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 do they make decisions at their companies and in their
personal lives? And what exactly makes your businesses tick? And the goal here, as always,
so that the rest of us can learn from their examples and go on to build our own successful
businesses.
In today's episode, I have the pleasure of speaking with AJ Gold. AJ is a serial entrepreneur.
He's a software developer who's been building online businesses since the early 2000s. And
today he's spending most of his time working on a product called Gmass. AJ, welcome to
the show. And thanks for joining me.
Thanks, Cortland. I'm super excited to be here.
I'm excited to have you. So tell us a little bit about Gmass, AJ. What exactly does it
do? And why do people use it? Gmass is a plugin for your Gmail account. And what it lets you
do is it lets you send email campaigns directly from inside your Gmail account. So most people
have heard of MailChimp. MailChimp is the ubiquitous name and email marketing. So if
you know what MailChimp does, we provide that functionality inside Gmail.
Okay, let's say you don't know what MailChimp does. What exactly is an email campaign? Why
do you need any sort of special tool to help you send emails rather than just Gmail itself?
Right because when you're sending an email to a friend or to a coworker, that's easy
to do. You just type up a message and you hit send. But anytime you get into sending
a higher volume of email, that gets a little trickier. Because most consumer email systems
like Gmail or Yahoo Mail or Outlook.com or live.com aren't equipped to handle a large
send from one single user where multiple emails are going out simultaneously. So some extra
software is needed when you're sending out 1000s of emails as opposed to one email at
a time.
Yeah, and I've seen people run into this limit, unexpectedly, where they're like, hey, I've
got an email list now I just want to send you know, 200 emails through my Gmail account
and then she smells like you can't do that. And sometimes people are pretty surprised
to see that that's not actually the case.
Yeah, yeah, that's interesting. So you actually might be able to get away with 200 emails
just by plopping those 200 addresses into the two field putting in your subject and
your message and getting send in Gmail. It's not the best idea. There's better ways to
do it, like using my product or someone else's product that does something similar. But in
a lot of cases, our users are sending higher volume than that. And what a lot of people
don't know is that their regular Gmail accounts allow them to send 500 emails a day. And if
you're on the professional version of Gmail, which is called G Suite, Google actually lets
you send 2000 emails a day just through your regular Gmail account without my tool without
anything special.
So one of the coolest things about GMass is just how much success that you've had with
this product with such a small team. I mean, it's pretty remarkable. GMass makes how much
$120,000 a month in revenue?
Approximately. Yeah, yeah, we're growing slowly and steadily. So this month will even be a
bit more.
That's humongous. And you're doing with a tiny team. I mean, you and just a handful
of remote workers are building this. What does your team look like exactly?
So I'm a software developer myself, I write most of the code for the product. I have one
contract developer who works for me part time. I have a couple of Philippines based virtual
assistants who work for me full time. I have a part time marketing person and a part time
PR person. And and then some freelancers on Upwork who helped me with design and illustrations
and some WordPress stuff. Yeah, that's that's pretty much it right now.
Yeah, it's the exact opposite of sort of the prototypical Silicon Valley startup where
you have a fancy office and you're you know, paying all these full time employees extremely
high amount of money to help you with your business.
Yep. And there are several of those types of companies who we compete against.
Exactly. And so you're kind of in a way living the anti hacker dream. I mean, almost everybody
that I talked to and the anti hackers community wants to achieve what you've achieved running
a small team and generating an outsized amount of revenue. How did you do it? How do you
actually get to this place?
Well, I've had a long career in software development and email marketing products specifically.
So my first email marketing product was a product called Django mail, which I built
and ran from 2003 to about 2013. I sold it in 2013 to a private equity group. And then
I spent a couple of years just thinking a lot and reading and hanging out at Starbucks
and trying to figure out what I wanted to do next. I didn't think I would ever go back
into the email space. But something interesting happened in 2014, which caught my attention.
And what happened was Google released an API for Gmail. And even though Gmail had been
around for for a while, at least at least 10 years at that point, this was the first
time that programming on top of Gmail became a lot easier. So there were ways in the past
to integrate with Gmail. But with the API, it made things a lot easier and cleaner. And
I've always been a big Gmail fan, I tend to spend my day inside my Gmail account in one
form or another. And so when the API was launched, it just started this process of creative juices
flowing throughout me thinking about things that would be interesting to build. And that's
when I started building products on top of Gmail. And Gmail is my main product that I
spend most of my time on.
So let's rewind and go back to the very beginning of the story. 2003, you built your first
online business, I presume called Django Mail. Most people listening to this show are sort
of fledgling entrepreneurs, people who want to get started. What was it that sort of litify
under you and convince you to start a business rather than just taking a normal job?
Well, that was something I was considering. So I graduated from university in 1998. And
if you're old enough to think back that far, that was a time where every software company
every internet based company was hiring anybody they could get their hands on. So the job
market was really green. There were plenty of jobs to be had. And I was certainly interviewing
for jobs. But you know, I don't know, I just nothing really resonated with me. And in the
summers in between my university years, I was building websites for friends of my dad
that own small businesses. And I just enjoyed that freedom that independence that creativity.
And I felt like, you know, a lot of people, what I would say, Oh, I've started my own
software company, they'd say, wow, congratulations, you know, what a risk you're taking. But at
that time, back in 1998, it didn't feel like a risk, just because I knew I knew I could
always get a job if it didn't work out. And I was single, I didn't have any dependents,
I was living at home with my parents, I just it was the perfect time in my life to experiment.
And so I started out as a web development company. And then one of my projects for a
client involved sending email campaigns. And that project is what evolved into the Django
mail product. And actually, if you're familiar with the email marketing space at all, so
if you've heard of MailChimp or constant contacts, or eye contact, a lot of the competitors of
Django mail in that era, were started under a similar story, a company that was a web
development company that had an email project for a client and then turned it into a product.
How did Django mail go for you? You ended up running this company for something like
10 years, what are some of the bigger milestones in that story?
At first, it was easy to grow, it felt easy to grow just because by virtue of how growth
works, it's really, it's easy to go from 100 customers to 200 customers to 300 customers.
And it gets a little more difficult to go from 1000 customers to 2000 customers to 3000
customers. And my growth for Django mail was fueled entirely by pay per click advertising.
And so this was before there was Facebook ads. And before there was Twitter ads. This
was actually you if you are old enough to recall a platform called overture overture
was the original pay per click search model even before Google AdWords. So overture was
what first fueled Django mails growth. And then Google AdWords came along. And that
fueled growth even more. And at my peak, I was spending, I spent $90,000 one month on
Google AdWords, growing Django mail, our average spend was around 60,000. But this
was a pay per click advertising fueled growth model.
And you were confident that you would make up that amount of money in terms of customers
actually coming in and paying you to use your software.
Yeah, I was more confident in the beginning when we were spending less and perhaps less
confident towards the end. What justified it for me is that every now and then we'd
get what I referred to as a whale of a customer. So a whale to me was someone that came in
and needed to send 5 million emails a month or 10 million emails a month, where we'd be
billing anywhere from $20,000 a month to $50,000 a month.
So if I could land one of those a quarter, then it made the investment in Google AdWords
worth it. Our median customer back then was paying a couple hundred bucks a month. So
we weren't making money on those customers, but we were making money on the whales.
What's interesting to me about this business is that you're kind of running it in a little
bit of the dead zone of the internet era. I mean, there's the dot com crash and then
sort of the time you started GMass 2003, there wasn't much going on online. There weren't
many investors taking risks on companies. There weren't many people starting startups.
How did that affect your decisions that you made with running this business? And how is
that different from the environment today?
In a way, it was a simpler time. So now I could argue that there's the distraction or
even the lure of going out and raising money, because email marketing is a pretty proven
business model now. Whereas when I started with Django Mail in 2003, it really wasn't.
And there wasn't as supportive of a community around solo software developers starting SaaS
businesses back then. So there was no indie hackers. There was no product hunt. There
were no incubators in every major city to help tech startups grow. It was kind of the
wild west of launching software companies. And so in a way, it allowed me to focus more
purely on the art of creating a good product and building a business without a lot of things
that compete for my attention now, like I find it harder to focus and be productive
today than I did back when I started like back when I started, it was easy to code for
14 hours straight and make massive amounts of progress in a day on a product. Whereas
now, now it's a little harder.
I mean, you also didn't have smartphones and your Instagram or Twitter. Yeah, right. Yeah,
that's right. Yep. So a lot of these resources that you talk about incubators in every city,
you know, all these online blogs and then websites like indie hackers can be distractions,
but they can also be helpful because you can go there to learn how other people are building
these businesses and get funding, etc. How did you learn back then to make the right
decisions when there weren't that many resources, you sort of had to figure things out on your
own. Yeah, it was just it was trial and error. And, you know, one of the things that's great
about the internet now is that there's tons of resources that I can read. So if I'm want
to wanting to learn about digital marketing, I can read a million articles about that.
If I'm wanting to read about raising money, I can read a million articles about that.
Back then, that wasn't the case. So it was it was self taught, it was trial and error,
it was going to meetups and conferences and talking to people. So the learning was there,
but you had to make more of an effort to extract the information you needed. You know, there
were a lot of things that I wish I could have done differently with Django mail. So just
like to give our audience like some metrics and some comparison, Django mail and Mailchimp
started the same year. Mailchimp like took off and grew like a rocket ship and is probably
worth over a billion dollars now. Django mail kind of hit its peak at around five or six
million dollars a year in revenue. And it's easy now for me to look back and reflect upon
that time period and think about what I could have done differently to attain better growth.
And actually, I've spent a lot of time thinking about that. And I'm trying to apply some of
those thoughts and learnings to what I'm doing now. What are some of those learnings? I'm
sure we'd all be happy to hear. Yeah, well, so email has generally been a high margin
industry like anybody that has had a successful email marketing platform is probably operating
on pretty decent gross margins like anywhere from 20% to 60% just based on your business
model. And I remember when I was first trying to get Django mail acquired, I had a potential
buyer accuse me of starving the company for cash and cheating the company out of its own
growth by pocketing the profits rather than reinvesting the profits and growth. And that
was my model at the time because I just didn't I didn't know any better. I didn't I didn't
have enough of a growth. I didn't have enough of a marketing mindset or enough of a sales
mindset to know how to reinvest cash into a business to grow it. And so Django mail
became this highly profitable machine, where I would pocket the profits, but couldn't figure
out how to spend the profits to grow the business. And a lot of the other players in the space
at that time did figure that out. So so MailChimp figured that out and iContact figured that
out. And what's interesting is that when it came time to sell Django mail, I sold it in
2013. There were other companies that were around the same size in terms of revenue,
like in that $5 to $7 million a year revenue mark, that sold for way more than Django mail
sold, because they were on a good growth trajectory, whereas Django mail had flatlined for the
prior three years. And so one of my biggest lessons is that valuations of companies aren't
based on revenue and profit, but based on growth trajectory. And so now, with GMAS,
it's an interesting time for GMAS, because GMAS is growing, and it's profitable. And
I'm trying not to do what I did with Django mail before, which was pocket the profits
and not reinvest in growth. And I told myself, I'm not going to do it this time. But I'm
getting caught, I'm getting painted into the same corner, because GMAS is profitable. And
I'm trying to figure out how can I spend this money to grow the company. And I'm struggling
with that, like, I don't want to be profiting, I want to be reinvesting it. I'm not quite
sure what the right way to go about that is. So I'm wondering if like, that's just not
in my DNA, like, what's in my DNA is to create profitable businesses where profit is the
goal, not not growth, and not profit growth over revenue growth. But that's like a challenge
for me right now.
On one hand, that really does seem like a good problem to have, you know, you have too
much money, how do you spend it? I think a lot of people will be envious of being in
that position. Was there a moment for you where you looked at what you would build in
the business that you created with Django mail and said, Wow, I can't believe this.
I'm kind of set.
Certainly, I mean, Django mail was I was making more money than I had ever dreamed of making
when I was a kid. And yeah, I did feel good about it. I think I've always been a grass
is always greener type of person. So I tend to I tend to be a fairly harsh critic of myself.
And I compare myself to my peers a lot. And when I say my peers, I'm not comparing myself
to my software developer buddy down the road, I'm comparing myself to other CEOs of other
email marketing companies. So it's a pretty it's a pretty successful group of people to
try to keep up with. And, you know, I think I think I've always had this desire to leave
a legacy, I've had this desire to be known for something. And with Django mail, you know,
by most people's measure, Django mail was a great success, you know, good base of customers,
highly profitable, exited sold the whole thing. But I still I tend to focus on the things
I should have done better, the things I could have done that my peers were doing that allowed
them to grow faster.
Such a double edged sword, because I think I'm the same way. And thinking that way sort
of drives you to be more ambitious to achieve more. And so you're probably more successful
thinking that way than you would be otherwise. But you're also probably less happy and less
satisfied with whatever you've accomplished at any given moment.
You're absolutely right. I'm probably less happy than most of my CEO peers just because
of the way I see things. So yeah, it is a double edged sword.
Let's talk about the sale of Django mail, because I've had people on here who've sold
their companies before. But I've never had someone who sold to a private equity firm.
What was that process like? And what was going through your head when you decided to sell?
First let me preface that by saying that I had been wanting to sell for about the last
three years of running Django mail. So I was actively trying to sell Django mail from 2010
to 2013. And prior to selling, I had seven failed attempts to sell, wow, meaning, meaning
I had signed a letter of intent with with the buyer, the due diligence process started.
And then for one reason or the other, at some point, the deal fell apart. And that was a
pretty good learning experience for me as well. A lot of the people that I ended up
in bed with, so to speak, were people that didn't necessarily have the funds to buy the
company, but were trying to raise the funds from investors or a bank, while simultaneously
doing their due diligence on the company. And I just didn't really know any better at
the time. But it seems it seems so obvious, right? It seems so obvious that why would
you work with a potential acquirer that doesn't already have the money to buy the company,
but I just didn't know any better. And I assumed it was all the same whether they had the money
or not, I just assumed they could get the money if they didn't have it. But that turned
out to not always be the case. So when I mentioned those seven failed attempts prior to actually
succeeding, a lot of those were trying to sell to somebody that didn't have the money
to begin with, which I learned is a bad idea.
How did you turn things around and actually find somebody who did have money and would
be a good acquirer for your company?
It was a bit of luck and a bit of timing, a bit of good timing. I hired a colleague
of mine who was also in the email marketing industry, who knew a lot of the other CEOs
of email marketing companies. And I hired him to pitch Django mail for me to potential
acquirers. And normally, this would be done through like a professional investment bank
or some sort of a business broker. And I had used outfits like that in the past as well.
But it didn't quite work. And I had a personal relationship with this person. And so we gave
it a go and he ended up finding somebody whose specialty it was to buy software as a service
companies that were either declining or had become stagnant. This private equity group's
model was to take that inject their sales expertise into the company to then grow it
and eventually sell it. And so that's what happened. And I ended up selling to a private
equity group out of Omaha.
So in addition to not attempting to sell your company to people who don't have the money,
what do you think your biggest takeaways were from that process? And how could someone else
who's preparing to sell their company ensure that things go as well as possible?
Yeah, you know, well, one of the one of the most frustrating things about going through
the process for the first time and not having the education that someone that has been through
it would have is just learning about what's involved in due diligence and making sure
your books are in order and that your paperwork and contracts and customer lists are all in
order and well organized and easily accessible. One of the things that from a buyer's perspective
can make a deal go south is if there's a sense of chaos or disorganization in the company,
which was definitely true when I first started trying to sell Django mail, I wasn't aware
of everything that would be asked of me. So I just wasn't prepared from a documentation
perspective. And I hadn't been because I wasn't organizing customer contracts and vendor contracts
over the life of the company like I should have been. So there was a lot of education
just in how to run a clean operation that is simple to understand that makes it easy
for the buyer to do their due diligence.
Okay, so now you're at this point where you sold Django mail. This is a business that
was doing very well. It's making millions of dollars a year. I'm sure the sale actually
also went well. Why go back into business? Why not just retire and go live on a beach
somewhere?
That's sort of what I did for a period of time when I sold the company. I had just started
dating someone. I was in a new relationship. I was living in a new city and I was loving
life. I was reading a lot. I was not stressed. And actually, when I reflect upon that year
right after I sold, I still think that might have been the happiest year of my life. I
just kind of floated along and had random conversations with strangers a lot. I never
had to pull an all nighter fixing a bug or bringing up a server that went down. And it
was just a really happy time. But I got bored of it basically. And I was yearning to create
something again. And I didn't know what that thing was. But I've always enjoyed creating
software. So when Google released the API for Gmail, that kind of spurred my interest
in wanting to create something again, I think I've always been the type who can rest for
a little bit. But I wanted to create something. And I think part of it is fueled by this desire
to leave a legacy on the planet. I'm 41 years old now. And I hope to live a long healthy
life perhaps into my 80s or beyond. But I have been feeling my own mortality more recently.
And as part of that, I want to leave something that's lasting. I want to have created some
lasting effect in the software world beyond just making money. And so I think part of
the motivation is around that as well.
Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. It's easy to identify with. I think one of the challenges
for being in your position is that you'd already had this previous financial success. And so
I could easily see you be in a situation where you come up with these different ideas for
things to work on. But in the back of your mind, you're questioning, you know, is this
going to be as impactful as what I've already built in the past? Did that play into things
with you? Or did you sort of jump at the first idea that you had?
No, I didn't. I cycled through a lot of ideas before I landed on what I wanted to build.
But the way I kind of put into effect this idea of creating a legacy or having a more
lasting impression than Django Mill did was, GMass is a fairly economical product. And
a lot of people use GMass for free. So there's a couple hundred thousand users of GMass and
only a very small percentage of them pay to use it. But because GMass is in the hands
of so many more people, I feel like it has the ability to create that lasting impact
that I desire. You know, people you can use GMass for six or seven bucks a month, you
know, based on what you choose. And so that allows it to be used by a far greater number
of people than say Django Mill where the minimum pricing was $50 a month. And there was no
option to use it for free.
So let's talk about these early days of GMass. Most people listening in right now are in
a phase where they probably don't have an idea for what they want to work on, or they
have a vague idea, but they're not sure if it's a good one. How did you cycle through
all these different ideas and decide that GMass was the one to go with?
Well, I built it not knowing. So I built GMass on a hunch. And I think that's one benefit
that I have being a software developer is I can create a product, get an initial version
out usually within a couple weeks, just based on what the idea is and throw it out to family
and friends and other entrepreneurs that I know and colleagues and see if there's any
interest. And so when I was writing GMass, I actually wrote it out of a hotel room in
Hawaii, because my girlfriend at the time was doing her yoga training certification
in Hawaii. And we were living there for a month. And I hacked together the first version
of that in a couple of weeks working out of this hotel room. And I launched it on product
hunt, actually, this was now September 2015, we're talking about. And it was received pretty
well, you know, for for someone who is like an unknown product hunt user who didn't have
a substantial following, it got a decent amount of upvotes. You know, I think back in those
days, it was getting like a new user sign up every three minutes just by being featured
on the product on homepage. So that's what kind of first introduced GMass to the world.
And then a couple bloggers picked it up. I was on a couple of podcasts and things just
the ball got rolling from there. And that's, that's when I thought, All right, I think
I think I've got something here. Let's see what happens. But you know, it's kind of an
interesting thing, because I guess I tend to live in a lot of self doubt. So even now,
you know, you mentioned what GMass is revenues are right now. And, you know, there's a lot
of people using it. But I still think like, I at least once a day, I have the thought
that this isn't going to work out. And tomorrow, all of my users are going to leave for a competitor's
product, because I haven't done a good, a good enough job keeping up or someone's going
to create something better or, or nobody liked my product to begin with, they were just kind
of on it randomly, like, it's it like fuels this cycle of self doubt, that I think is
also healthy, because it keeps me like, it keeps me working really hard, this constant
fear I have that everybody's gonna leave. Yeah. And I think, you know, one of the interesting
things about GMass is that you're in this market that some might argue is crowded, you
know, there are lots of email marketing tools that exist. And when most people are trying
to come up with an idea, at least first time founders, they think they have to come up
with something that's completely unique, it needs to be something that the world has never
seen before. And that's not necessarily the case. Were you worried in the very beginning
that, you know, the existence of all this competition was going to make your life hard?
Oh, totally. So, so let me tell you just a little story about pricing with email marketing
from the beginning of the email marketing days to now. So when I when I first started
Django mail, we charged $5,000 per million emails set. So if you're sending 5 million
emails a month, we charged you 25 grand a month. So that was back in the days when there
were maybe 10 to 15 total email marketing software as a service platforms in existence.
But eventually what happened is that the barriers to entry came down and became a lot easier
to start an email marketing platform, to the point where email marketing became this commoditized
service, like every everybody was selling the same thing, everybody almost had the same
tagline, create your campaign, send your campaign, track your campaign. I can't even tell you
how many times I've seen the create send track tagline associated with some vendor. So as
more and more competitors flooded the market, prices were driven down. I mean, now an email
marketing vendor is lucky to get $500 per million emails sent. In developing gmas, really
the only reason I jumped back into email marketing with gmas is because I found something that
nobody else was doing. And that thing that I found, which is the reason that I wanted
to build gmas was nobody had made it so that you could send an email campaign from inside
the Gmail interface. So you're not launching an outside tool, you're not logging into something
else. You're doing everything from inside the Gmail interface. And that that continues
to be like our x factor. Because we have a ton of competitors that let you send email
campaigns from your Gmail account using an external interface. But the idea of doing
that was, was, I guess, boring to me, because that's, that's what Django mail was Django
mail was an external interface that let you send email campaigns. And so because I lived
my own life inside my own Gmail account, I wanted it to work within that framework. And
so that's the only reason I built it was because that didn't exist. And I wanted that to exist
that I will that into existence by building it myself.
So let's talk about this in a little bit more detail. How important would you say is the
initial idea of gmas being this unique product that lives inside the Gmail inbox compared
to your competitors versus the importance of the subsequent execution? You know, you
making the right decisions, and advertising in the right places and finding the right
customers, etc.
That is a really good question. So I don't think that I've made a lot of extremely brilliant
decisions outside of the fact that the product works inside of Gmail. You know, we've done
some things like you know, we have a blog and we've done some digital marketing and
we run Facebook ads and LinkedIn ads. And we you know, we support our customers, we
do all the things that other companies do. But yeah, that one standout factor is the
method in which the product is delivered. And for the technical folks out there, what
gmas is technically is it's a Chrome extension, which means that it's a plugin for your Chrome
browser, which is what allows it to kind of add things inside the Gmail interface. So
I think that that is probably the biggest factor in in our growth. I've always tried
to do things a little bit differently than everybody else. So like we have created some
tools. Actually, we launched a tool today that is kind of like the first for an email
marketing service. But we've always kind of taken the approach of building the tool that
nobody else has built yet. And so that is probably a factor in the growth. And then
the fact that it operates that the product is delivered in a way that is different from
everybody else. That's probably also a factor in the growth.
How helpful was it for you to have previous experience in the email marketing business?
Is this something that you think you could have come in with no experience and done the
same thing? Or was it crucial that you had started Django mail and worked on that in
the past?
I think that's turned out to be pretty relevant because there are features that I've been
able to build and optimizations I've been able to make in terms of the delivery of campaigns
that my competitors haven't been able to because they don't have as deep of an expertise in
email marketing and email delivery that that I do so and I can I can think of examples
of how competitors have implemented something where I can say, Ah, man, they did that because
they're not aware of the fact that there's blacklists that list URLs and you need to
check those before validating whether a campaign is ready to send and things like that. There's
lots of lots of expertise that I have from my years in Django mail that have been relevant
here.
So let's go back to these early days of GMass. You sat down, you banged out this app in a
couple weeks. You eventually got to the point where you felt comfortable launching it on
Product Hunt and a few publications picked it up. And that's where you got your first
customers. How did you grow your business from there? What were some of the first decisions
you made to sort of take this to the next level and turn into a real company?
So one of the primary decisions I made early on was that it was going to be a free product.
So I didn't I didn't charge for GMass until about a year into building it. So I had built
up a user base of free users that were sending campaigns in the low thousands of emails a
day that when it came time to charge, most were happy to then subscribe. So by not having
charged for a while, it allowed me to build up a base of of users that I could collect
feedback from that would help improve the product and that were joyfully using it because
it was free.
And how did you find these users? Were you just like running ads and said, Hey, free
email marketing? Or did they sort of spread it through her mouth themselves?
Yeah, no, in the beginning, I wasn't running any ads. I didn't I didn't run any ads until
I had started monetizing and kind of set aside a budget for paid ads. So in the beginning,
it was it was some product on action, some Reddit action being featured by some bloggers,
and then some visibility. Google gives you some visibility just for being a Chrome extension.
So you get visibility on the Chrome extension store, which is which is officially called
the Chrome Web Store. And that was enough to bring in 50 to 60 signups a day. And that
was enough traction to keep me motivated to keep building the product and adding features
and and supporting those users because I was always doing it with the hope that 50 to 60
years a day would turn into a bit more to turn into a bit more until the time came to
start monetizing. And then I could turn it into a real business.
Did you have like a detailed product roadmap at that point knowing exactly what you're
going to build or are you going mostly off of, you know, customer feedback and changing
things every week?
No, I didn't then and I don't even today. So I tend to get distracted easily by by like,
like a bright shiny object in the corner. So there are some days where I'll wake up
and I'll think, Oh, man, it would be so cool if we had a link validator tool built into
gmas and then I'll spend like the entire day like building that tool, which probably isn't
the smartest decision from a business growth perspective. But that's what fuels the software
developer inside of me is to be able to think of an idea and to execute it and to get this
thing that I've been working on functional and in the hands of users, the better business
approach is to research what users want or research what will add more users to the product
and build that not by building the shiny thing that's like this interesting idea in your
head. And I do get I get caught up in that cycle a lot.
I think it's a common thing for programmers to get caught up in that cycle. But it's part
of what makes it fun to be an indie hacker that you have this creative freedom to really
build whatever you want and put that into the world. And you have the power to do it
in your situation because you're a developer yourself. And so yeah, if you want to take
a day to add your pet feature, then you can just do it and see how it turns out.
Yeah, totally. And that's that's probably why I would never be good at like raising
money or dealing with investors or dealing with a partner. Because that mode of operation
probably wouldn't fly well in a more structured environment.
So you say that you probably wouldn't be good dealing with a partner and you've been kind
of a solo founder through this entire experience running these email businesses. What skills
do you think you're most lacking on?
Sales and marketing is where I've always been the weakest. And it's also why the model of
all my software as a service operations have been salesperson less models. So my models
have always been based on inbound lead generation and optimizing conversion rates, not on hiring
salespeople to go knock on doors. That's mostly because I've never really understood sales.
I don't know how to hire a VP of sales. I don't know how to create strategic alliances
with other companies. So in a way that's probably limited my growth. And at some point, maybe
I will want to hire that skill. But I also like you know, along with sales and marketing,
I also kind of have this, I have a little bit of a fear of working with people. And,
you know, this this kind of plays into how we operate gmas, you know, we gmas is a very
is not a customer centric operation. So I think a lot of software as a service companies,
the conventional wisdom is to build a great product and provide absolutely fantastic support
to your customers. So you know, just really hold your customers hands. And that's what's
gonna, that's what's gonna create great vibes and a great company and culture going forward.
So we actually don't do that. I focus on building a great product. But we don't focus on customer
support, we kind of tell our customers that they have to figure things out on their own
and support themselves. And that goes hand in hand with my general fear or anxiety just
in talking to people or in working with large groups of people. And so that's why you know,
my companies have been the way they are, you know, very AJ Goyle centric, solo operations
with a little bit of ancillary help in different areas of a company's operation. But you know,
my personality, my culture is infused in all aspects of how gmas operates.
I think that's really great to hear. It's like, you compensate for the things that you
don't feel confident about or that you don't like doing by like, really thinking about
your business from the ground up in such a way that you won't have to do those things.
Not that you're gonna do a bad job at them, but you don't even have to do them. I think
most programmers probably feel similar to the way that you do. You know, I just want
to build the features. I want the product to sort of grow itself. I don't really want
to talk to anybody and have to sell my products to them, etc. But people run into issues doing
that because marketing is hard as well. Growing by reaching, you know, 1000s of people without
having to talk to them is a pretty difficult challenge. Is there anything you did to engineer
your business from the ground up to make that part of it easier?
So as a software developer, I you know, I have my software development strengths and
my weaknesses. My strengths are back end code, databases, server side stuff, my weaknesses
are are everything on the client side, the user interface, the user experience, the design
of the product, I'm a terrible designer. So knowing this, I wanted the barrier to entry
to signing up and to start using gmas to be as seamless as possible. And because I because
I have a distaste for or because I my weakness is design and user interfaces. That's also
partially why there is no interface for gmas gmail is the interface for gmas. There's no
external UI because I hate building ui's. And another thing I like personally dislike
about just being on the web in general is filling out forms. I hate filling out forms.
So to sign up and start using gmas, you don't fill out any forms. It's literally a series
of clicking things to link your gmail account to the product and to send your first test
campaign. In fact, the only time you have to fill out a form as part of the sign up
process is if you want to subscribe and that's to put in your credit card number.
That's super smart to do it that way. And you mentioned that you guys aren't a customer
centric company, you kind of tell customers, they have to figure this out on their own.
How exactly do you do that in a polite way that doesn't upset people and piss them off?
It's been a struggle because I can I can certainly say that we have a lot of pissed off customers
from over the years. And even today, if I if I look through our support queue, I guarantee
there's there's 10 or 15 people who are like, what the f I've had a question in for a week
now and haven't gotten an answer. So it's it's a balancing act. So I try to communicate
it as proactively as possible. So when you subscribe, you get a notice saying that, hey,
look, most companies focus on customer support, we don't. But this is how you can support
yourself. We have this whole support philosophy that we have a post up on our blog, where
we kind of reiterate the same principles. But to counter that, we've also written tons
and tons of content that answers every question we can possibly think of that a user would
have. And so what we do is when somebody asks a question that we don't have a canned response
for that I'll write an article answering that. So hopefully the next time somebody has that
question, they will find it. So it's been a systematic process of creating content and
adding tips throughout the GMAS application, such that the questions don't need to be asked
in the first place.
Yeah, that makes a ton of sense. And I think, you know, in addition to doing that, you mentioned
earlier that you've hired you brought on sort of all remote team and people working in the
Philippines and people working in other countries to help you out with, you know, PR and with
support and with programming. When did you make it first hire? And what is sort of your
philosophy for when to bring on people to help you out?
Actually, my first hire was in September of 2016. So it was about a year into running
GMAS. And that first hire was a full time hire in Chicago, where she kind of just helped
me run the operations for both of my products, GMAS and my other product, WordZen, which
we haven't talked about a whole lot, but that's okay. It was just a time where there was I
needed someone to bring some organization into the company and to kind of help with
everything from billing issues to technical support issues to server maintenance issues.
And I just needed some someone that was highly trainable that I could teach to do a lot of
things to get things off my plate. And so to answer the other part of your question
is, when do I know that I want to hire someone, it's usually to offload something that I'm
already doing. And I feel like there's a better way to be strategic about hiring. So I don't
always want to like hire someone when there's an urgency, which is how it's always been.
So like, I'm super busy. And we've got all of these server maintenance issues. So now
I need to hire a sysadmin to take that off my plate. So I can focus on the million other
things that I have to do. A better approach would probably be to always be looking out
for talent, where it's not always like a fire drill to get someone on board to alleviate
the workload.
I like talking to you because you have the sort of self aware attitude about you where
you're like, I'm doing things this way. But here's the better way to do it. Yeah, right.
But it's like kind of demonstrating like you can build this company where you're generating
a lot of revenue, you're making over a million dollars a year, but you're not doing everything
perfectly. And sometimes things feel duct taped together. And sometimes you're just
following your passions and building the features that you want, you know, and running your
business in the way that makes you the most comfortable. And I think that's kind of what
makes running your own company enjoyable.
Totally. So I recognize that I have a lot of freedom and just independence and a lack
of accountability where some of my other tech CEO friends don't because they've raised 10
million bucks, 20 million bucks, and now they are they are accountable to to these stakeholders
and their company and they don't have the freedom to just run the company they want
to. And, you know, their payday comes when the company exits, you know, my payday can
come steadily as as I run the company and run the operation. And there's a trade off
because you know, if if there's a big payday for me at the end where GMAS gets acquired,
it probably won't be as sizable as someone that has has taken on money to fuel hyper
growth.
So you talked earlier about having this desire to leave your mark on the world and to really
leave something lasting behind. Let's say I gave you this, this hypothetical where I
can tell you AJ, I'm 100% certain that if you raise money from investors, you're going
to leave your mark on the world. And GMAS will turn into something where you really
feel accomplished about it. But you're also going to hate your life and feel accountable
and not be able to make the decisions that you want, like, or you can go the way that
you're going and you're going to be 100% likely to succeed and make a lot of money and build
something that's like a successful business, but maybe isn't, you know, as impactful as
you want it to be, which option would you choose?
So here's where some cognitive dissonance kicks in. Because even though I said earlier
on, and I believe that I want to have this lasting impact, and I believe that option
one taking the money to have a bigger impact would be the way to leave a legacy. That's
probably never an option I'm going to pursue just because of the sacrifice in independence
and just the time and resources that it takes to get a deal done, whereas I could spend
that same time and resources in building the product and making it better and fueling the
software developer side of me.
So even though I want the one thing, I'm not willing to take the approach that will get
me that one thing.
Yeah, and it's to be fair, I'm drawing a false dichotomy here. It's not necessarily the case
that you have to do all that stuff to build something and leave a lasting impact on the
world. But it's interesting to kind of see where your head's at. And, you know, I wonder
how you think about that today, knowing that you have sort of the habits and the desires
to keep your business small and endy. Do you still feel like you really want to build this
lasting impact thing?
I do, I do, but I want to do it. I want to do it at my own pace and in my own way, while
I'm still in control. So in the end, my independence and my creative freedom is probably that probably
trumps the desire to have a legacy, which is why I continue to operate the company the
way I do.
You know, there was a famous article in in the Harvard Business Review that came out
like 10 years ago, it was called to be rich versus king. I don't know if you've heard
of this, but basically, the article theorizes that the CEOs that become super rich are the
ones that take on money, and then eventually have a big exit. But the CEOs that prefer
to be king, so maintain their independence, control everything are the ones that don't
take on money. And so they don't make as much money, but they continue to be in control.
And it presents this, this path that entrepreneurs go down to be rich or to be king.
Yeah, and it sounds like, you know, most people in the Andy hackers audience really care about
being king, you know, and that's not to say that being rich isn't great, but there are
levels to it. And you can obviously, obviously make a lot of money while still also maintaining
some level of control over your lifestyle and your business and the creative decisions
that you make at work.
Certainly, certainly.
So let's talk a little bit about this process you mentioned earlier of going from having
all these free users of GMass to deciding to flip a switch and start charging. How did
that go exactly?
So I remember it was I remember that my my birthday is on August 4. And I remember that
my birthday present to myself for the year 2016 was that I wanted to launch my monetization
on my birthday. So like July 31, August 1, August 2, I was working on my integration
with stripe so that I could launch it on August 4. And I had started by sending out an email
to my however, however many users I had at that time, maybe 50 or 60,000 saying, Hey,
you know, starting on August 4, if you are sending more than 50 emails at a time, we're
gonna ask you to subscribe. And man, I was so surprised. It was such a such a rude awakening
at how much negativity I got in response. You know, I got a lot of got a lot of fus
like, you know, you said this product was free, and now you're gonna start charging
for it. That's that's not fair. Or, or hey, you know, you might think that that $7 a month
is a negligible expense, but that's that's more than I can afford. And it was this eye
opening because being a US citizen, you know, living in this country, and, you know, being
in a career that is, you know, generally thought of as lucrative, $7 a month doesn't seem like
a lot. But we had a lot of we had a lot of users in third world countries, where $7 a
month was substantial. So initially, there was a lot of there was some backlash. But
what turned out the way it turned out is that the users that wrote back the people that
were upset were the ones that wrote back the ones that were totally fine with subscribing,
I never heard from and they just paid when it came time to pay. So it created this off
kilter perception in my head that I was I was in trouble because everyone because so
many people were upset. But I think you know, it's kind of how life goes where when someone
is pissed off about something, they're more likely to write a review on say Yelp or Trip
Advisor, then when they're happy about something. And so that was the case with the initial
response that I got. So it was scary. And I remember when I flipped the switch, like,
you compile the code, and I deployed the code where suddenly you had to subscribe to send
more than 50 emails. And I'm waiting and I'm waiting for that first for that first credit
card to be put in. And like an hour goes by in two hours go by and not a single credit
card has been put in. I'm like, man, is there something wrong with the code. So then I tested
with my own credit card and it works. I'm like, all right, it's working, but nobody's
subscribing. And then it hit me. It hit me. This was I was I was living in Chicago at
the time this was like 2am Chicago time. I'm like, okay, well, right now, most of my users
are the users in like India and China. And so maybe I just need to wait until morning
US time and then I'll get some subscribers. So I went to bed having zero subscribers,
kind of like waiting for morning to come and when morning came, I popped up out of bed
and and checked my phone and and I had I had a handful of subscribers from the morning.
So it was it was totally a roller coaster of emotions.
Yeah, that had to feel pretty relieving. What do you think were some of the biggest decisions
that you made that helped you go from, you know, just a small handful of subscribers
at first to that, you know, seven, eight, 9000 subscribers that you guys have today.
One of the primary decisions was to keep the interface inside Gmail. So that makes the
learning curve really low because you just don't have to learn an external interface.
Another decision was to focus on on technical content on our blog. So if you read a lot
of a lot of competitors email marketing blogs, you can tell that the content is written specifically
around like certain SEO keywords and phrases that they hope to rank for. And that always
kind of bothered me because I've always enjoyed writing and I enjoy reading. But I hate like
reading an article thinking, I don't think this article was written to actually teach
me anything. I think this article was written just to get some SEO juice out of it.
So I wanted to take a different approach from the beginning. So if you look at our blog,
all of our content is is fairly technical and fairly in depth and and teaches users
how to do complex things in the arena of email marketing. And it turns out that that has allowed
our content to rank well. So that drives a lot of traffic and a lot of signups. Interestingly
by not focusing on SEO, we ended up ranking pretty well for SEO.
Yeah, theoretically, Google's job should be to find the most educational and helpful
articles and so you can kind of, you know, do a bit, cross your fingers and close your
eyes and write the best content and hope that Google takes care of the rest.
That's always been the hope but but like millions of SEO firms exist because they've figured
out or are hoping to gain the system a little bit. So, you know, in the beginning, I didn't
know if my like, I guess organic, more mindful approach would work.
Have you ever worried at all about being so dependent on Gmail that, you know, Gmail makes
a change in their API or somehow changes a rule that your business is done?
Yeah, totally. In fact, something just happened a few weeks ago. So okay, on a regular basis,
Gmail changes its code and GMAS breaks. So, GMAS is rendered completely useless at least
once a month because Gmail changes its interface to the point where all of the GMAS buttons
that we add disappear. And so we've now written a system so that when that happens, my phone
like blows up on me so I can address it right away. So that happens on a regular basis.
But then Google is also been Google has been in this process of changing things for a while.
And they just announced this change a few weeks ago where everybody that has built an
app on top of the Gmail API starting next year is going to have to start paying Google
a fee anywhere from like $15,000 to $75,000 Wow, for them to like audit our security.
So I guess there've been some less than scrupulous developers that have taken advantage of the
API and tricked users into getting their data. And so Google is taking a more serious approach
to developers building specifically on top of Gmail. So they're adding this whole like
audit security review process starting next year, which I am going to write a blog post
about this, but I my feeling is that this could stifle innovation because now it'll
be a lot harder to like have an idea for a new app and just to throw it out there to
see if it sticks, because one will have to go through this intensive security review
process before an app can even be made to the available to the public. So there are
things like that that have to be kind of dealt with on a constant basis. And so yeah, I do
have this fear that you know, what if what if Google decides hey, no more no more third
party plugins that that send email in mass through our platform, if Google decided that
then then yeah, gmass would be in trouble. So let's say that did happen. You know, gmass
is dead tomorrow. What are you a j gold decide to do with your life? Well, I mean, well,
I wouldn't go down that easily. So I would I would try to adapt and and kind of circumvent
our email sending around the Google ecosystem. But let's say let's say for argument sake
that that gmass was no longer, what would I do with my life I would I would go back
to what I did after I sold Django mail, which was which is I would take time off I would
read, spend time with family, go to Starbucks a lot, random conversations with strangers,
and just wait until the next spark. And the history of gmass and you started this business
in 2015. What if anything, would you change if you could go back in time?
I know I know what I would have changed. So I've mentioned that I'm a I'm a bad designer.
So the gmass website and the gmass Chrome extension reflect a bunch of poor design skills.
So one thing I would have done differently from the beginning is I would have had a designer
to spend a little bit of time initially to create a good design for the product. And
I think that I think that could have had a significant difference in in user adoption.
So you know, we have a lot of users, but I think we would have even more if I had gotten
the design right from the beginning.
And what would your advice be? For other people who are listening to this podcast who are
maybe inspired by your story and want to set out to build their own and the hacker business?
What do you think they should do?
From an overarching standpoint, I think one of the things that allow that has allowed
me to be successful is to not follow the patterns that everyone else writes about or blogs about.
So there's, there's tons and tons of content about how to grow your SaaS business and how
to how to rank for a keyword and how to run a digital marketing campaign.
But in the end, I think what's allowed any company to be successful is to carve their
own path and to figure out their own unique moves, their own unique strategies that get
the product in front of the users. Like I just kind of had this belief that if there's
a million articles that teach you how to do something, then learning that skill probably
isn't that important to your business.
So a lot of the things that I've done to grow G mass aren't the things that you read about
in the articles that exist on how to grow a SaaS business. They're just things that
I've experimented with and figured out. So making G mass a Chrome extension, as opposed
to an external interface, you know, building, we have this, we have this delivery analyzer
tool that tells you if your email is going to the inbox folder, the spam folder and figuring
out the things that you can do that are different from what everyone else is doing.
That's great advice, AJ. And I think it'll really help people build things that stand
out. Thanks 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 G mass and what's going on in your personal
life as well?
Yeah, so you can go to the G mass website. It's gmass.co. G-M-A-S-S dot C-O. Some day
I hope to get the dot com, but it's not in the cards quite yet. And you can email me
or find me on Twitter. I'm part time snob on Twitter or email me at A-J-A-Y at word
zen.com.
Thanks so much, AJ.
Thanks, Cordland.
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
on 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.