What's up, everybody? This is Cortland from IndieHackers.com, and you're listening to
the IndieHackers podcast. More people than ever are building cool stuff online and making
a lot of money in the process. And on this show, I sit down with these IndieHackers to
discuss the ideas, the opportunities, and the strategies they're taking advantage of
so the rest of us can do the same. James Layfield, welcome to the IndieHackers podcast.
Thank you for having me. I'm excited to be here.
You're the founder of a company called ClearFind. It's a Sasp business, software as a service,
which I think is extremely hard to do nowadays. It's kind of like every engineer's dream to
build some software that, you know, you put it out there and it's in the world and all
your customers are using it, and they're clicking buttons, and they're getting emails, notifications,
and paying you money every night while you're asleep, while you're making tea, while you're
doing whatever you want. Software is awesome, but it's so crowded. So many people are doing
software as a service business. It felt like there were no more ideas left in this space,
you know, five, six years ago, let alone a couple years ago, three years ago when you
started ClearFind. And yet, you've gotten to this place today that's amazing. You go
to your website and you're clearly crushing it. You have some really big brand name customers
like you're selling to Airbnb, you're selling to Zoom, you're selling to Slack. I just want
to say that's awesome. I'm curious about, you know, how you feel about your progress
so far, like where is ClearFind and are you happy with where you've gotten to?
That is a beautiful introduction to that. So thank you. I appreciate it. So like any
journey, especially an entrepreneurial journey, it is always easier when you're where you
are, when you look back on what you had to go through to get where you are. And so it's
been a long journey this one. So I've had, I've had many businesses so I can talk as
a sort of serial founder, serial entrepreneur. I think this is my 14th or 15th business.
So probably more than most people ever do. And I've done it in every sector from FinTech
to VC from in this place, SaaS to property, you name it, I've done it. And so I've got
an interesting, interesting perspective. And ClearFind is a really beautiful, beautiful
business. I love what we've created. And as you say, there is definitely a sense that
everyone's trying to, to create something where you can go see that and you're making
money. And that is a very beautiful idea of what a SaaS business might be like. It's
never quite like that. But the realities of ClearFind, we set out to do something that
is unique and to the best of my knowledge and listeners, email in if this is not true.
We are the only people in the world that are doing what we're doing. Now that sounds like
an insanely ridiculous over claim. And the reason I know it isn't an over claim is because
of the people that we're talking to out in the world in terms of potential clients, people
in POC with us and clients, the types of conversations we're having with them mean that if there
was someone else doing what we're doing, the conversation would join a very different way.
But what normally happens is they are over the moon to hear from us. And they're excited
that we're able to solve a problem that they've not been able to solve until now. So what
on earth is ClearFind? So what ClearFind is, it's about understanding the software you
have at a fundamental level in terms of what the software does. So uniquely, we have a
data set that we've spent a lot of R&D working out together on the features of different
pieces of software. Nobody else has that data set. Gartner doesn't have it. G2 doesn't have
it. Accenture doesn't have it. Deloitte doesn't have it. Google doesn't have it. Nobody has
it. Because for whatever reason, people haven't bothered or wanted to look at that level of
granular detail. And so we went out into the market and decided to uncover this crucial
piece of information, which is it's all very well knowing that you have a software. But
if you don't know what it does at a feature level comprehensively, you can't strategically
understand how that fits within your business and your priorities and your requirements.
So we did that work. We are out in the market now. As you say, we've got some amazing traction
with some amazing clients. And interestingly, some of the world's largest consulting firms
are now using our tool to do this work for them, for their clients, because it's so much
more effective than the way it's been done to date.
I got a few questions. First of all, do you share like revenue numbers or like ballpark
revenue numbers? Is that something you're comfortable sharing?
At this stage, we are not publicly sharing that information. And it's more because up
until now, I funded the business myself. And so it's been a really interesting journey
for that. And I would definitely say to people who are looking at starting, funding the business
yourself creates lots of interesting challenges. One, obviously, you're spending your own money,
which is one challenge. But what's really interesting is the VC world is very much a
game to some degree. And if you're in the game, you can play the game. And when you
outside the game, they don't want to let you into the game. And so they don't really love
it when you fund it yourself. What they would much rather you do is to get their money.
And so I think there is an interesting lesson there, which is if you want to play the VC
game, and you want to grow your company with VC money, which for some companies makes a
lot of sense. And for my company, I think it all makes sense. Don't put loads of your
own money in to start with, because they are not loving it.
So I've put in around $3 million on my own money, which is obviously a lot of money.
And I'm obviously quite committed to this project. But it's been really interesting
talking to VCs, because they're like, well, you've bootstrapped it. It's like, yeah, $3
million of bootstrapping. How would you invest with us? We'll put a million in. So what a
third of what I've put in? Yeah, okay. And I've bootstrapped it. It's just such a weird
conversation. And so at the moment, because we're literally as we speak now, fundraising,
we're in a really interesting position for fundraising because of these dynamics. One
is we've gone after a problem that no one else has solved. And so it's a hard problem
to solve, and we solved it. But we had to spend the money to solve it. And I'm not sure
that VC money would have been patient enough with us, because we didn't even start selling
till last October. So for three years, we didn't even try and make any money. We weren't
going to market at all, because we had to crack the problem. We cracked the problem
and then went to market. And so right now, we're doing that fundraising thing. And so
many VCs listening give us a call. We've got something special. But revenue numbers at
the moment, we're just not declaring. Okay, that makes perfect sense. And I have a thousand
questions I want to ask you about putting $3 million of your own money into this business.
Why are you so convicted? How do you even have $3 million put into the business? But
maybe we'll get to that eventually. And maybe the best way to start is at the beginning.
You said that you started 14, 15 businesses. How many of those would you consider to have
been successful? And how many of those did you bail on?
Success is such an interesting question. I mean, obviously, the simple metric could be
monetary success. And in that sense, a limited number that have been very successful in terms
of how much money they've made. But what I found is more that by doing this by going
through this process and learning lots of different aspects of business, and learning
what I can do, what I can't do, and learning lots of different problems and how to overcome
them, I overcome them, you become a much more well rounded individual in terms of each project
builds on the last. And so where I am now with ClearFind, ClearFind wouldn't exist if
I didn't have one of my previous businesses, which was we created the world's largest innovation
laboratory for FinTech. It's called RISE. We've been doing it for nearly 10 years now.
It's in partnership with a bank called Barclays. And that has been a phenomenally successful
project globally. It's the biggest in the world in seven different countries. It's been
an amazing asset to the bank. It's been a really valuable thing to do. And that helped
me do this. In fact, I wouldn't have come up with the idea for ClearFind without that.
But that business came out of another business I did in the UK, which was a co-working business,
which I would never have thought would have happened. But I basically created the first
co-working business in the UK. Google at the time wanted to do something called Google
for Entrepreneurs. And they wanted to create something called Google Campus. There wasn't
anything called Google Campus back then. And then they came to me and asked for our help
in creating this thing called Google Campus, which we then, as my then co-worker, we helped
them design and build. So we operated the first ever Google Campuses. They're now all
over the world. But because of that, then Boris Johnson, who's now the Prime Minister
of the UK, but at the time was the Mayor of London, his office recommended that Barclays
Bank speak to me because of what we've done for Google. So it's such a bizarre web.
It's like a never ending set of dominoes that fall into each other. The next one going forward.
Absolutely. So all these things weirdly link back together, although you wouldn't have
thought so on the surface of it.
What's your background? Because I'm curious, what kind of person decides to be an entrepreneur
who pushes through dozens of businesses that may or may not succeed monetarily, but feels
optimistic about going on to the next one. Did you grow up in an entrepreneurial family?
Did you have friends who were doing this?
Well, it's interesting. So there's three things to note. So one of the things that's interesting
is there was a university that was doing a study into the way that business leaders think
and particularly entrepreneurs think. And so I was part of that study. And they did
a fMRI scan. So you would lay in the MRI machine and they would be doing things talking to
you and then you'd be responding and they'd be watching in real time what your brain did.
And what they found, which is quite interesting and plays to what you said, is that my brain
and the brains of entrepreneurs tend to not hear the word no. And so when someone says
something to an entrepreneur, where the answer should be no, a different part of the brain
fires. And they've actually proven it. So it's not like a theoretical thing. It actually
happens. And this whole area fires up. There's like no chance that this is going to work
out, which is fascinating. So that's interesting. But to dive back into my past, so I'm from
a small working class town in Yorkshire called Hull. It's about a population of about, I
think about 516,000 people now, but back then it was a little bit less. And my dad, he was
an auto electrician. So he worked for himself and he fixed the electrics on cars when humans
could do that. And my mum was like, I don't know, like a bit of a wheeler dealer and she
would do everything. She was a hairdresser. She used to sell clothes. She used to sell
perfumes. And I remember one summer my sister and I would be sat in our front room and we'd
have three buckets in front of us. And my mum had somehow got hold of these plugs. So
the sockets that you have on the electrical appliances. And these plugs were illegal.
And so we will end stripping them for the parts. So we put infuses in one box, brass
in another box. And it's just like, so my experience of being a child was very much,
I mean, entrepreneurial was one way of looking at it, but it was, I suppose, in a way to
a degree, it was like, if you're a working class family, you haven't got much money,
you do whatever you can to make money. And my mum was really good at that. And so I suppose
in a sense that was a spark. And then the third thing was, I grew up in sort of Margaret
Thatcher's time. And she was really interesting in terms of like promoting the idea of an
individual as a business driver. And so particularly Richard Branson was held up as a symbol of
a new economy. And for me as a child, and I think for the British people at large, Richard
Branson, the Virgin Group was a really exciting, sexy thing. And so there's this guy with a
beard who wears sweaters, and he's making lots of money, he's doing cool things. And
so I aspired to be like Richard Branson. And funnily enough, I ended up working for him.
And it was actually working for him that made me decide I could do this myself. I thought,
Richard Branson, you're great, but I can do this myself. He was a beautiful catalyst
in many ways.
I love that. There's something that's so real and this concept of a role model, where we're
all just like people trying to figure out like, you know, who are we and what is our
place in the world. And we look at other examples, especially when we're kids like, okay, well,
who else do people respect? Who else do people look up to? And when you have these figures,
like for me in the 90s, growing up, it was Bill Gates. I was a computer nerd. He was
a computer nerd. The adults around me told me, oh, you know, one day you can grow up
and be like Bill Gates. So I'm like, okay, that's who I aspire to be. I guess that means
I should be an entrepreneur and create my own thing. And it's, you know, I wonder today,
you know, like they do surveys of Generation Z, like the latest group of kids, and they're
all like looking up to YouTube stars and TikTok stars. Those are their heroes, you know, I'm
not sure there's as many entrepreneurial heroes. There aren't as many people who are being
propped up as this is somebody you want to be like, you know, they're, they're people
like Mark Zuckerberg or Jeff Bezos, who are like, for all intents and purposes, like demonized,
you know, and then you occasionally have the Elon Musk's. But it's, it's, it's something
here time and time again, where people can very easily identify, I had this role model
growing up who did this extraordinary thing and who other people respected. And so that's
what set me on my course. And then the second half of your story is, oh, I found that they
were actually human. And they're not superhuman. And I'm a human. So that gave me a lot of
confidence. And maybe I can do something similar, you know, I don't have to be the superhuman
larger than life person in order to do something similar to what my heroes did. Did you ever
have a point where you thought you were going to just go on the sort of normal path that
you were going to go to school, get a job, work at nine to five, and, you know, not start
15 companies?
And I started life actually in advertising. And so actually, when I grew up in the 80s,
I wanted to be a stockbroker, because in the 80s, that was a cool thing to do. I don't
think it's anymore. It exists anymore, probably as a job. Anyway, so I didn't get to do that.
And then I wanted to work in advertising, because I love the creative energy of advertising.
I love that. Again, I suppose in the early 90s, late 80s, it was very much a thing that
people were sort of, it was very, like, I've been in a gigantic sexy industry as it has
been for a long time, not so much now, I don't think. And so I wanted to work in advertising.
So I got my first job in advertising. But I found, I suppose, I found working for other
people a challenge. And it was through that experience of working in advertising, I got
to meet and work for Branson. So one of the companies I worked for, which is a very large
company, they call Omnicom, they're one of the biggest media companies in the world,
media buying, planning agencies, creative agencies in the world, or groups, and they
had Virgin as a client. And I then got to work on Virgin as their whatever account manager,
media planner, they were then looking for someone to be a brand director. And I was
in my 20s, I was like, I know the perfect person, I emailed, I know the perfect person.
It's me. And so I got the job, which is amazing. And so in my early 20s, I was working as a
brand director for Virgin. And then again, in my early 20s, I was a managing director
of one of these Virgin companies. But interestingly, it was a website. So it was called virginstudent.com
ironic name, but in Britain, it seemed to make sense. It was it was a precursor to Facebook.
And so back in the day, there used to be a website in the US called College Club. It
was again, that was a precursor to Facebook. So before Myspace, before Facebook was College
Club, it was the it was it was the biggest student website in the US. And back in the
day, instead of them going to Europe, they licensed their technology to us. And so we
came over to LA and literally with a computer took back the technology, reinstalled it in
some machines and span up what was then Virgin students. So we became the biggest student
website in the UK 10 years before Facebook existed. And so but it was it was a funny
time because the bandwidth just wasn't there. So we had all the functionality that you would
expect a community website like that to have, but people couldn't really use it just because
there wasn't the bandwidth there to, to actually upload videos, watch movies, I mean, it was
just but it was definitely ahead of its time. And it was a really interesting foray into
that world. And it taught me an enormous amount about a working for an organization like Virgin
B, starting your own company, because effectively, the unit that we started was like running
your own company, just backed by this incredible brand brand and money.
It's funny that you say that you had trouble working for other people. Because when you
spoke about your time in the fMRI machine, and the results of the study that entrepreneurs
react differently to the word no, I think one of the other big things that entrepreneurs
react differently to is maybe it's not authority, but maybe it's like something that restricts
our freedom, the idea that we're working for a boss who's telling us, here's the creative
direction you need to go in. And by the way, here's also the people you're going to work
with. And here's the cap on how much money I'm going to pay you. And here's the time
you need to come in on the schedule. And you're like, I think I have better ideas than this,
you know, I think I'd rather be my own boss. And a lot of times, I think for these entrepreneurs
like myself, it's not even this, this, you know, innate passion for entrepreneurship,
it's almost like an inability to do anything else. It's like, I'm just not going to be
able to get a nine to five job, because I'm not going to listen. And I'm gonna be frustrated
doing things somebody else's way.
Well, there's a beautiful freedom to it. I mean, for a long time, my entrepreneurial
journey was like a sort of an anchor in the sense that I thought that to be good as an
entrepreneur meant certain things, things around how much time you'd have to commit
to something that that you had to be all about work and not about life. And so for a long
time, in fact, before I became successful as an entrepreneur, my belief system was very
old fashioned in terms of like, the sort of work hard, play hard, which I feel like is
a bit of an old idea now, and that you have to be in early and you have to strive and
you have to do this. And so I would be someone who was was proud of the concept of being
a workaholic and thinking that being a workaholic equals good, because if you're a workaholic
and you're really passionate about this, it's going to work out. And it wasn't until I started
to realize through a number of interventions that I had from either people I was with or
people that I met or people that I brought in to sort of support me in my journey. And
that was just a total nonsense. And actually, the true freedom, and I think the entrepreneurial
journey can give you true freedom, true freedom is the ability to use your skills to create
maximum leverage. And that doesn't mean to say that you have to work long hours all the
time, you could have a moment of insight that could be transformative, that takes two minutes.
It doesn't, I don't need to get up at 7am and start work at 7am and work on 7am a night
to get good outcomes. That's not true. And so I found that over the last 7 to 10 years,
I've just got more freedom. So I'm much more free as a person. And I think that freedom
I value and I relish. So I mean, last week I was in Turkey on next, tomorrow I'm going
to Miami, the week after that I'm going to New York, the week after that I'm going to
Washington, the week after that I'm going back to Mexico. I'm in Mexico right now. And
I've realized that actually, I can have a wonderful life and create incredible outcomes.
And through obviously the fact that in a way, one of the greatest things that came out of
COVID was an acceptance that physical presence is no longer required to do business. And
I think that's a beautiful moment in our evolution, that up until COVID, if I were to get a client
who was based in San Francisco, I'd have to get on a plane to San Francisco. And they
would expect me to do that. And I would expect to do that. And if I said, Oh, actually, no,
I'm not doing that. We'll do a video call. It was, it was a lesser engagement. Now,
I can, I can be sat in Turkey and you can be sat in San Francisco. And yes, it may be
very late in the evening for me, but we can have a sales call. And you will be as happy
to have that call and actually quite enjoy the fact that I'm in Turkey rather than thinking
Oh, well, this guy's out of the way in Turkey.
And it's nuts, because it's all just sort of these social cultural norms, like you were
saying people will just expect like, oh, this guy must must not be serious if he's not flying
over here, because that's how things are done. Not because it's logical, not because it's
reasonable, not because technology or the deal requires it, because this is how things
are done. And it's very rare that anything happens at like a global scale that causes
a sort of mass cultural shift. We all agree to change the rules. And fortunately, for
this situation, we change the rules for something for the better, for like, hey, actually, it
doesn't matter where people are. And it's tremendously more convenient. And I think
it's also creating tremendously more business opportunities, because if everybody's doing
work remotely, that's a gigantic well of new problems that need to be solved, new solutions
that can help things, I think proceed a little bit more smoothly, increase the wheels of
this new interaction. So I'm right there with you. I think it's great. I want to talk about
these businesses that you started, and we don't have time to go through all 14. So maybe
we'll do your first business and your most successful business and clear find. How does
that sound?
That sounds great. Hopefully, clear find will end up being the most successful business.
What was the very first business you started?
This is a bit of a cheat, really. But my first actual business I had was when I was, again,
I said that my family wasn't necessarily entrepreneurial in the sense that we're talking about, but
we're trying to make money for themselves. And so as a kid, I had to work and go and
do stuff, not like working down the mines. But I was basically, it was normal to have
a job. My pocket money came from me working. But also, I was encouraged to do my own thing.
And so my first ever business was actually selling eggs door to door, which is very weird.
It was cleverly called J. Lay eggs. Get it? And so I started this business, and a farmer
would deliver eggs to my house. I mean, bear in mind, I lived in the city, and there were
farms there by them to deliver eggs to my house. On a Friday night, I would sit packing
eggs into boxes, some of which had the brilliant J. Lay eggs brand on. And then I would go
out door to door selling eggs. I mean, it was the most random thing in the world. But
the one thing I'll say about it is door to door sales. I mean, Jehovah's Witnesses have
to be some of the best salespeople on earth, them in the moments. If you can learn to sell
door to door, you can sell anything to anyone. Because you learn how to take rejection. You
learn how to not be affected by this. You learn how to project yourself. You learn how
to read someone. You learn all these incredible skills. So I was fortunate that I got to do
that as a kid. And obviously, as a kid, you've got that cute kidness on your side. So it's
not quite as challenging as being a Jehovah's Witness. And that's why I think you should
go and do that because that's the best sales job in the world. If you can do that, you
are a genius and you should be head of sales for Google. But my first proper entrepreneurial
job, which wasn't that was, so when I was working with Virgin, as I said, we had this
brilliant business, which was a precursor to Facebook, like 10 years too early. And
it didn't work. It was a failure because the other thing that was hilarious was we were
trying to sell advertising space on our website to brands. And so we're Virgin. And so we
go up to, I don't know, let's say AT&T and say, hey, guys, do you want to promote your
cell phones on our website? But you're Virgin Mobile, aren't you? Yeah, we're Virgin Mobile,
but don't worry about that. Do you want to do that? And they're like, no. And then we'd
go to American Airlines and say, hey, guys, do you want to promote your flights on our
website? So you're Virgin Atlantic, aren't you? Yeah, don't worry about that. It was
a disaster because everyone, we competed with everybody, especially in the UK, where they're
more prevalent. I mean, there's Virgin Gems, there's Virgin Active, there's Virgin White.
You name it. They're in a category. So everyone we went to see, we're like, yeah, slinging
it up, mate. Oh, they think we're spying on them. We'd be sat in the offices of a competitor
of one of the brands and they'd be like, oh, these spies. So that was disastrous. Anyway,
but because it didn't work, the first thing at the time that I was the managing director
of the company, and so I went into the office and said, look, guys, this is not going to
work. But what could work is if we make everyone redundant, including me, and that I take over
this business and you instead become my client. And so I convinced Virgin Mobile, who'd been
very supportive of that project, to instead of basically working with this Virgin company,
to work with me and my own company, to do the same work for them. So we became not so
much of a website, but we actually entered into this area of experiential marketing.
So creating brand experiences, and this is back in, I want to say like 2000, but that's
a quite a long time here, creating brand experiences where we would engage customers in that particular
thing. So Virgin Mobile was our first client, and I got them to pay us a year in advance
so that we could cash for the business. So I took six of the people. We all got my redundant.
I took my redundancy money. I took the year in advance money from Virgin, which to be
fair was an amazing gift. They did not have to do that. And then we started the business
and then we started winning clients. We won EA, we won Jack Daniels, we won Axe. We won
some amazing brands and we became a really phenomenal experiential agency back in the
day.
And what did you learn from this experience that you took with you? Because obviously
you shut that business down or you sold it or something happened. You sold it, moved
on to other things.
I think I learned a few things. What I learned is that you can make money out of anything,
anything. And I think that's what's really fascinating. People are always looking for
the idea. And I think that's a nonsense. I don't think there is the idea or the perfect
idea or whatever. And a lot of people stop themselves going on this journey because they're
waiting for the perfect idea. And I think the reality is there is money to be made in
any sector, in anything, in things that people would think would be the worst possible thing
you get. People still are making money right now on foreign currency transactions. How
is that even possible? How is that even a thing? But it is a business. I know someone
who started during COVID, a foreign currency business in South America, and he's making
money. Turned over a million dollars last year and he's making money. It's like, that
sounds like a crazy business you enter these days. You've got transfer wise. You've got
all these fin texts. What on earth is going on? And the reality is there is money everywhere.
You just have to put your mind to it and understand what you bring to the party. So that's the
first thing I learned. So it wasn't that I was incredibly passionate about experiential
marketing. In fact, the word experiential marketing when I started the business didn't
exist. It was more that I saw there was a simple transaction opportunity that I could
be engaged with. That there was a creative space that I could play in where I could create
things for things that I liked, which was brands. I like brands. I like supporting brands.
And I could see that we could create something for a brand and that we could premiumize that
and there is a business in that. And that I think was one of the main lessons. I think
the other thing that's interesting is just I suppose it's like keeping on the path. And
like seeing when you need to make changes and not being too stuck in your ways. I think
again, one of the biggest failures that an entrepreneur can realize would be when they
think that they're right all the time and they're not willing to change. And the reality
is everything's super malleable and there is no truth. Like there is definitively no
truth. There is definitively no black and white. There is definitively no answers or
any of this stuff. Like something isn't really definitively better than anything else. It
just doesn't seem to exist in the real world. It's just our perception. And so knowing that
that's the case, if you get too wary to something that you think is a truth, you can bomb your
business very quickly because if the market is not responding to this idea, listen to
the bloody market. And if you think about, so for example, ClearFind is a good example.
So when we first started, we thought ClearFind would be about finding new tools. So we thought
that people would use this data set to help them match with a tool. So instead of going
down to the world and saying, well, what do I need? I have no idea. And going on sites
like G2 Crowd, which is just absolute, as far as I'm concerned, bollocks. Because it's
basically, it's reviews. It's five star, four star, three star reviews. Think about this.
You're in your hometown, wherever you live, or your favorite city, and you're looking
for a great restaurant recommendation. And you go on to Yelp or you go into Google reviews
and you say, right, I'm going to go to the best restaurant in this town. And I want to
find it because I'm going to get the place that has the most five stars. And then you
turn up at McDonald's. Hooray! Because that sort has the most five stars. Is it the best
restaurant? To me, no. But does it have the most five star reviews? Absolutely. And that's
the problem with all these, with BYG2 Crowd. It tells you absolute shit. Like if a farmer
in Minnesota thinks this software has five stars, and you're CEO of Coca Cola, how is
that useful? How is that useful? Yeah. But that is the way that world has worked. And
so we thought that is such nonsense. How can that be true? What if instead of this nonsense,
we'll not say, Oh, look at this, look at this, look at this, look at this and basically sell
your advertising, which is what they do. We will tell you what to buy. We'll actually
give you an answer to the question, what's the right software to me? Like back of my
answer, not sort of ambiguous. Oh, well, it could be this one, but why do you look at
this one? It's like, no, no, it's this. Buy it. Simple. Totally unbiased. And so we started
life there. But the interesting is the paradigm is that people are happy with this crappy
experience of getting five star reviews. They love it. And so people are like, well, I can
go onto G2 Crowd and I'll get a five star. Yeah, but it's shit. I know it's shit, but
it's quick. Yeah, it is quick, but it is also shit. And so, and this is our experience.
And basically people just were not that bothered. And so it wasn't until we sort of saw that
and heard that and our clients were saying, well, yeah, I do want to use you, but that
we realized that what we need to do is to turn this thing on its head. And so what we
then did is we said, Oh my goodness, we have this incredible understanding of software
at a feature level. What can you do with that apart from help match you? And the thing you
can do, which is quite incredible is you can look at the entirety of someone's software
that they've bought for their company and tell them what software they need to remove
because all the features of that software are duplicated with some other tool. And we're
the only people that can do that. The only other way you would do that would be to bring
in an Accenture. And interestingly, someone like an Accenture might use us now. So, so
that is where we ended up. And that sort of hopefully answer the question. Yeah. Yeah.
I love it. And I love how that ties into your learnings from your earlier businesses, which
was there are two of them, but they're in essence, two sides of the same coin. The first
was you can make money doing anything. And the second is you got to be willing to be
proven wrong by the market. You can't be sort of bullheaded and say, whatever I think is
true and keep forging into an area where you're not going to make money. And I know a lot
of people who are really good at recognizing that first point, they will go into any market.
They'll start anything. They can start with the worst idea on earth and they'll be confident.
They can eventually make money because they'll look around and say, look, what are the problems
people actually value? And they'll pivot what they're doing and eventually get to where
the money is. And like, that's what you've done with clear find beautifully where essentially
you built this technology and I'm just summarizing some people don't like, so the lesson isn't
lost on people. Because I think a lot of people are in the situation where they're like, what
I'm doing isn't working. People aren't knocking down my door to get it. They're not paying
me for it. They're wishy washy. They say it's cool. But then, you know, when push comes
to shove, it's not working. And I think what you did was you said, okay, this problem that
you thought people had, which is like a G2 sucks, the alternative sucks, turns out not
to be accurate. It's not act doesn't actually suck for people as much as you thought it
would suck or should suck. But there is another problem that people have that is valuable
to them that you can help solve, which is that they're wasting billions of dollars a
year on software. And I have this problem too. And any hackers, it's like, I've got
my budget stripe, we buy a lot of software, some of it I'm probably not using and could
easily be replaced. And like, I need to manage my budget because like, I want to be able
to spend it efficiently. Who doesn't want to save money? Everybody wants to save money.
And like, that is you doing exactly what you said in point number one, finding out where
the money is in this space, and then sort of pivoting your product to offer something
of value. Because if people are willing to pay money for it, that means people find it
value. People aren't throwing away their money for no reason. And so I love that you so clearly
demonstrated an example of how to go into a space, potentially guess wrong, but then
still figure out, you know, how to land these bigger customers who are going to be paying
you these huge contracts because you're solving a real problem for them. So I got to ask,
how did you get $3 million to invest in your own business? You know, not everybody has
that kind of money to put into a business.
There's definitely a culture which I don't love where being an entrepreneur isn't in
any way correlated to making money successfully. It's more about I think being free and working
for yourself. And to me, those things are different. I think you can be free and work
for yourself and have a nice lifestyle, or you can be free and work for yourself and
get by, or you can be free and work for yourself and struggle. But to me, to be an entrepreneur
is to create something that intern is actually successful. And so I've been on a mission
to do that, to realize the value that I'm not just working in order to survive, but
that I am working to use my assets to create a disproportional leverage so that I am more
free than I would have been. So not necessarily tied down to anything really, because I'm
able to create a successful apparel journey, where I'm able to amass wealth in a way in
a conventional way. I mean, the saddest part of us as our society is that we do still have
to go to work, and we do still have to earn money, and that we still work in a world where
more money is perceived to be a good thing. And so that someone who makes 10 million a
year is more successful than someone who makes two million a year is more successful than
someone who makes 150 grand a year is more successful than someone who makes 30 grand
a year. I'm not sure that's the way that the world should work. But I've played that game
for a while, and been quite good at playing the game, not as good as Jeff Bezos. He seems
much better than many other people. But that's the other thing that's interesting, isn't
it? Like you can set your sights on different things. So for a long time, I have had this
goal of generating $100 million and thinking if I had $100 million, that would be a decently
successful career. Which is interesting, because obviously for most people, that might be insane.
And for some people, that's not a lot of money, which I think is really interesting. Like
for some people who have less money than that would still say, well, that's not a very big
goal.
Money is an interesting thing in that like, not everything has such a wide range. Like
you can't be five times taller than somebody, you can't be 10 times smarter than somebody,
but you can be literally a billion times richer than somebody, like there's almost no end
in sight to how much more and so like, I've had the same sort of phenomenon was like,
I've been more successful, I've hung around people who are even more successful than I
ever knew, because I grew up like very middle class and like the suburbs of Georgia, you
know, or if you had a job paying you 100 grand a year, you were like balling and you
were on top of society. And now I know people who like, as you're saying who laugh at $100
billion, you're like, oh, that's that's cute, you know, and that's insane to me. And those
people look at people who laugh at them.
Yeah, I think that's one of the interesting things about living in New York. So I moved
from London. So London, obviously, a capital city, obviously, a little bit screwed up now
by the stupidity of leaving Europe. But that's another stock topic. But London is a place
where you would expect it to be high performers, very competitive, all those things you expect
in some capital cities. But then when I moved to New York, I reframed the concept of wealth
for me. Because if you're a millionaire in New York, you're sort of poor, which is sounds
like a stupid thing to say. But if you make a million dollars a year, you're not well
off in New York, which in any other city in the world, that doesn't make any sense. But
in New York, that sort of makes sense because it's a city built on the idea that money is
the most important thing anyone can achieve in life, and that you've never got enough
of it. Even if you think you have, you definitely haven't. And so that was a really interesting
framing for me moving to New York and seeing that very different view of what wealth looks
like.
Yeah, Paul Graham has a good article about, I think it's called Cities and Ambition. And
he tells you about the different things that like the different messages that different
cities send, because almost every city attracts ambitious people, but they attract you for
different reasons. And so he says like in New York tells you above all, you should make
more money. That's the message you constantly get in New York. Boston tells you, you should
be smarter, right? MIT is here, Harvard is here, like you need to like my friends in
Boston are getting like MD PhD. So you never feel like it's enough, right? Because it's
like you are not credentialed enough, you're not successful enough. And so I think it's
very in a way we can control indirectly what we're going to strive for in life by controlling
who we surround ourselves with, in part by controlling which cities that we live in because
these cities are going to feed us these messages. And it's very easy to get sucked into it.
But I don't want to get too far off topic. So now we're on the topic of clearfied, which
is the business you're running today, which is very cool. You went through this long period
of time where you're funding the business with your, you're bankrolling it yourself,
you're bootstrapping it, you're not raising money from venture capitalists, you're saying
I'm going to do this myself. Is that because you didn't think that it was possible for
you to break into the VC networks? You mentioned earlier that they might not like
it. Interesting. There's a couple of things. I think up until this business, I haven't
ever bothered to get external funding. So every other business I've done, I found a
way to not ask for anyone else's money, pretty much. And that just gives you an enormous
amount of freedom. But the interesting thing about it is it also creates a ceiling of the
game you can play. So one of the reasons in 2017 I moved to New York was because I thought
I wanted to go into a tech business. I wanted to play the game of VC. And so I wanted to
come up with an idea that would be interesting to that audience. Because I could see that
America has always been wonderful at creating phenomenal global brands. And it's also been
wonderful at creating the phenomenon of venture capital really, and leveraging that in a way
they know the market really has still. And having this transfer of value where the game
is effectively can you, as the people who actually do the work, cling on to enough equity
to make it worthwhile. And I always think that in my mind, there's like a chart that
just has a simple line on it, which is basically like, how much money would you have made if
you'd not got VC money? And where does that intersect with a VC money piece? And so you're
always trying to race if you go for VC money, you're racing against the at that moment,
so that you end up better off having spent five to 10 years working for them and yourself,
then you would have if you'd spent the same five to 10 years doing it yourself. And so
if you spent 10 years on a business, and you could get it to turn over 10 or 20 million,
then you've got businesses potentially worth 100 million, let's say, and you own all of
it. Or you could go to VCs, and you'll try and get to a business that's worth a billion
dollars, but will you earn 100 millions worth of it at the end. And that, for me, has been
the reason I've been so reticent. And so the reason I've self funded up until now, has
been because I wanted to make sure that the inflection point that we brought in the funding
was sufficiently high, that I knew that I was getting leverage that was beyond the leverage
I would have got by funding myself. And what's been really fascinating as I've gone down
this path is to see that it's like the art world. If you know anything about the art
world, and I know very little, you don't you don't become an artist that sold in galleries
unless you went down a certain path, you have to go to the certain school, you have to have
a certain agent, and then you get into the certain galleries and then you get into that
scene. It is a rigged game. And if you are the best artists in the world, but you don't
play by the rules, you will not break into it. And it's exactly the same with VC, it's
completely a rigged game. So they don't want you to break the rules, they like the rules
as they are. And so in a way for it to work, what you have to do is they are fuck, they
still want to basically get their bite of the cherry as if I hadn't put three million
dollars in because the game doesn't work when you put in your own money like that. That's
not how you play. And so I think if anything, and this is what I was saying, if you're out
there thinking about selling your own business, go and get them. If you want to play the VC
game, play it from the start, because the only way to play is why things like, why come
there? They are the perfect example. It's a rigged game from the start, you go to them,
they take a percentage, but because you went to them and they took a percentage, then you
get investors from these people. It is a completely rigged game. You do not have to have a good
product to do that, you have to play the game. And if you can play the game, and you go through
that channel, you will pretend to do better than someone who's got a far better product
who didn't play that game. And so I think it's important that people understand that
that's all it is, is a totally different game that you could lose as well, just like anything.
And you have to be cognizant of it. What I've always said to my I said to the guys that
when I start my next business after this one, I'm going to play the game from the start
with their money, because I wanted to see what happens. And it's gonna be interesting
to play that game in a different way. Interestingly, I am a VC as well. So I'm a general partner
in my own fund with some really fabulous guys, we invest in FinTech. And it's so great to
be able to be in the position of both liking and loathing myself in that role. And I think
there is a need for a change in the industry. I don't know when it'll come because the industry
is fucked right now. It doesn't make any sense. And most people lose from it. But but the
way the industry is geared, it doesn't it doesn't long term make sense. Yes, some people make
a lot of money, but the whole thing is slightly skewed in the wrong way. And I don't think
incentivize the right behaviors as it stands. I could talk to you about VC forever. We only
got we only got like 10 minutes left. So let's talk about your company. Because well, let
me ask you one more question on being a VC, which is, do you think that as a VC, you wouldn't
invest in somebody in your position, who's put a lot of money into their company, if
you see that the numbers are there, that they're growing rapidly, that there is a market that
they have an opportunity to get really big?
Yeah, well, what I find interesting is, I suppose my in my naivety, I suppose as as
an entrepreneur, I am a risk taker, in a sense, the interesting thing is I think entrepreneurs
perceive risk differently, I don't think entrepreneurs enter into ventures that they perceive to
be high risk. But from the outside, their activities look high risk, like you were surprised
I put three million of my money into this business, because that seems like a risk.
To me, it doesn't feel like a risk. And that's where perception, the same exact thing is
very different. But what I've been really disappointed in is the actual risk threshold
of VC is very low, they basically want you to be already winning, be on the way to an
amazing market, have all these customers to learn, and then they'll put the money is like,
hang on, if you do that, I don't need fucking money at that point, I can just go to a bank
and borrow it. But that's sort of what they want to do. And I think that is so interesting.
Because I assume that venture capital was more like adventure. And it's much more like,
it's more like just, it's funny, because all most of the bets don't work out. But the current
metrics for what success looks like are very simplistic. And it's just like, well, look,
if someone's doing these things, that must be good. And that's the metric that we will
judge them by. Instead of saying, if we put our investment here, we can push these guys
into this position, which will mean that they will then fulfill this potential. Instead
of saying, well, look, you need to fulfill the potential before we put our money in,
which is just it's very interesting.
Yeah, that's the risk. That's where the risk comes in. So with clear find, obviously, you
put in all this money, and you're confident, how do you deploy that money? You put $3 million
in a company, how do you ensure that you're spending on the right things? How much of
that goes to engineering? How much of that goes to advertising or marketing? Do you deploy
that in stages? Do you do an MVP? What did it look like with clear find?
Yeah, I think the answer is you can never know if you do the right things. You can never
know except in hindsight, if the decisions you made were the right decisions, it's impossible.
So that you've got to get that out of your head straight away. Because if you go down
that path, you'll just not do anything. And so what we have done is we've basically deployed
that over the course of two and a half years, it's not been a massive dump of cash in it's
been over the course of and it's basically finding things that we think make sense and
betting on those things a little bit. And so say, look, if we put more money into this,
is he going to do this? So yes, it's been spent on engineering. Yes, it's been spent
on research. Some of it's been spent on marketing, some of it's been spent on branding. But a
lot of it has been spent on just finding out how to crack this problem. So research and
development turns with you.
What was the very first thing you spent money on?
The very first thing we spent money on was my, so I haven't got paid yet, obviously,
we had to pay the business and then take the money out myself to make sense. So the first,
so my co-founder has a salary. So the first thing that we spent money on was my co-founder
and her salary. And then our head of engineering and his salary. And again, they're both below
market salary because of the nature of the venture. But that was the first thing we started
spending money on. And it's basically spending money on talent is the key to really gain
a successful business. And I think not spending money as much as possible, especially in the
early stages on third parties and external companies, because there's a whole industry
that's set up around taking money off small companies and startups to try and help them.
But not all of them, most of them, even though their intentions are good, I'm not sure that
that money is best deployed with those third parties. It is probably better to spend on
internal talent, who have a real vested interest and a real passion about the project, then
spend it on third parties, who for you, for them, you are a contract that they want to
make a marginal.
Yeah. And you have this sort of path where, in the beginning, it was mostly about figuring
out how to solve this problem. So that's building the right software that you think is going
to solve the right problem and then actually trying to sell to customers, discovering that
they don't care about that problem. And then where do you go from here? You have two things
you need to do, basically. Build different software that's going to solve a different
problem, then also identify what that problem is and try to see if people are going to buy
it. How did you do that second part? Because I think most people listening don't have that
much trouble building. Most of us are builders. We could put things together, even if it's
sloppy and crappy. We'll figure it out. But how do you even take it to customers and be
like, what would you pay for this?
What happened is, as I said, to give the real world example, we'd had this experience where
we tried to go to market, and we brought on this board of these amazing advisors, and
they were all from top, top, top companies, and they were all working with us on the development
of the search product. And so it was so funny at the end of that process that none of them
bought it. I'm like, Ian, you guys fucking helped us create it. What the fuck? But anyway,
they were like, oh, no, it's amazing. Oh, it's fantastic. And it's like, yeah, you can
call them buy it. But then we started to see these signals. And we were very, very, very
fortunate to have started a dialogue with one of the biggest tech companies in the world
and come across an insightful individual in that company who loved what we were doing
and had been talking to us about the search thing. But it was that individual in a meeting
in, say, September, where they said, look, the search thing we like, but what about this?
You've got this amazing data on features. Surely you can look at what I've already bought
and tell me what to do with it. And we're like, yeah, whatever. And we left the meeting.
We totally ignored him. And then when we started to struggle, which was a few weeks later,
we're like, what was that guy saying that mean? Do you remember what he said? It's not
about using our data differently. And then we're like, oh my God. So we then sort of
fuck this. We've spent so much money getting to where we are. We need to get on and do
this. And so we had a management meeting, let's say, 11 a.m. And I had a sales call
about the old product at one. And I just said, look, I'm going to go on that sales call and
sell him this new idea. I'm just going to do it. So I got on the call and I said, look,
we've got this amazing thing I'm actually going to show you. But how would you feel
if instead of basically just telling you what new software you could get, we could look
at all the software you had and tell you what you need to keep and remove? And he goes,
oh, I love that idea. I said, great, give me a week. I'm going to come back to you.
So a week later, I went back to him with some wireframes and said, look, this is what it
looks like. And he says, great. And then a week later, I went back to him again and said,
this is a product. And he bought it there and then. And so it was, I just think you don't
need anything to sell someone on something. Now, obviously, to close them, you may need
something. But to get them to the point where they can sort of get into your head and understand
what you're saying, you don't need even a working product. You need just the idea of
how it will work and the confidence and understanding to express that to someone.
So if you could go back in time, like how would you prevent that period of time where
you didn't know what people wanted? Would you have asked different questions to your
customers? Would you have tried to sell them?
It's very interesting, because as I said, we thought we were doing that. And we really
did work with this advisory board of people from all these companies for months. It wasn't
like we did it for a week or an hour. We did it every week for months.
I've been there, though. That's why I asked this question. We're like, I'm pretty sure
I'm doing the right things. I think I'm talking to my customers. I think that I'm building
something that they're going to pay for and then been wrong.
I think it's probably, there's two things I think are really important. One is not to
hold on to ideas too tightly. And I think we've got very, even though I said it earlier
on this conversation, that you shouldn't. I think I got quite wedded to this idea that
it was so much better than mine. My disgust at G2 Crowd's existence was so potent that
I think it drove a passion in our solution that was disproportionate to that of our
customer. And on the other side, I think you have to be always listening. And I think it's
easy for people to say listening. And what people normally think of as listening is just
like being quiet a bit while the other person's speaking. What's normally happening is that
you're thinking to yourself, oh, well, oh, actually, I need to make a note about this.
And oh, actually, it's interesting what you said there. Let me make a note about this.
And oh, actually, what? I'm going to have to have lunch. And you're just not actually
fucking listening. Yes, you're not talking, but you're not listening. And when you listen,
you hear things. And I know that's not a trite thing to say. I don't mean it in a trite way.
I mean, you can be struck by insights inside the conversation, either in the words explicitly
or implied by the way that they're talking, that can then help you. So we literally had
a client tell us what to do. And we ignored them because we weren't willing to listen.
The client literally told us what to do. And weeks, weeks past before we realized what
they'd said, because we were not there. We were there to sell them our tool. We were
not there to hear them improve our tool. We were not there to hear new ideas about our
tool. We were there to sell them our tool. And so I think the thing that I would do differently,
and I know this, I knew it before, I just forgot, was actually fucking listen to people
when they're talking to you.
It's simple to listen, but it's not easy. It's a simple idea. It's not easy to execute.
So where do you go from here? You're raising money. You want to make this bigger. How does
it get bigger? Do you just ramp up sales? Do you have the best product? And how do you
even do that? Because you're selling something that no one's ever bought software that's
going to tell them what to sell.
So we are very fortunate in that we are a small sales team, you're looking at them.
And again, I'm always trying to leverage. And I think it comes from having real businesses
that make money. And again, this is no disrespect to VC, but most of the businesses they have
don't make money. I'm used to businesses that actually make money. And so I've been someone
who through that experience has learned a lot about how to make a little bit of money
go a long way. And I think those skills are invaluable in many ways. They're very different
skills from VC-backed businesses. They don't look at things in a similar way. But what
is meant is I've tried to leverage. So I'm one person, I can only reach so many people.
So how can I help Clearfind reach more people? Well, channel partners. Channel partners aren't
typically a VC solution. VCs don't love channel partners. VCs like you to go out there and
sell all individual people. They'd rather you sell to 100,000 people selling for a dollar
than sell to one person selling for $100,000. That's just not the way they think about the
world. I get it. But channel partners are an incredibly potent tool if you get them
right. And actually, as VC-backed businesses grow, they end up going to channel partners
because it's the way you actually grow. But they don't always start there. But with Clearfind,
we've started there. And so we are very fortunate to have an exclusive arrangement, which is
soon to be launched in the media. So I can't say who it's with. But it's with one of the
world's largest resellers of software. And we are now using their incredible brand and
sales team to get into clients that we would have taken a long time to get into. We have
another relationship with a leading top five consulting firm. And those guys are using
our platform to talk to their customers. So suddenly, this little man here has now got
a multi-thousand strong sales organization behind him. And so we're going to probably
end the year doing between $2 and $3 million of revenue this year, even though we started
selling last year. So for any company VC-backed or not, to go from no sales to $3 million
in less than 12 months is really good, thanks to a channel partner strategy, which is the
company antithesis of the way you would normally do it with VC money.
Yeah. Well, maybe I'll close on this question, because that's so useful. And it's super
impressive you're doing this by yourself. Most people listening are inexperienced. Like
you, they're just one person, but they don't have a team of people around them. And so
they have to do everything. And so they'll do the coding, they'll do, you know, all the
sort of operational stuff, and they need to sit down, do the sales. And that scares the
hell out of a lot of people. How do I sell something to anyone?
Jehovah's Witnesses. Hire them! Hire Jehovah's Witnesses. But you can't do that. And you
got to be a founder and do it all on your own. What do you think people listening should
take away from what you've learned? How can they learn how to reach out to partners and
have these calls and, you know, potentially either sell their product or learn what they're
doing wrong the way that you have?
I think, again, the listening thing comes into a lot. It's very easy for people to think
that selling is about talking. And I think selling is about listening. If you really
want to sell to someone, then you have to hear them. You have to let them speak about
their problems, let them share with you their pain points, let them express where they see
you fitting into their current roadmap, strategy, day, and give them the chance to talk to you.
Because I think people think that you go onto a sales call and you bring up your deck or
whatever the hell or you bring up your demo and you just talk at someone. The most successful
sales calls I've ever had are where you say very little and you get them to tell you what's
going on in their world and why it's useful. Because the other thing that's interesting
is one of the nice questions you can ask at the top of the call is, given that everyone
is busy, I don't think anyone goes to work and is like, I've got a lot of time today,
what shall I do? Might as well do some demos. That's not the way the world works. So they've
made a time in their day to see you. So something you said in your email, in your whatever resonated
with them. And what I like to start with and say to them, look, be honest, like, hey, you're
busy. You've got a lot going on in your world. Why do you make the time to see me today? Let
them tell you that. And that then is the beautiful hook into their pain point. Because for whatever
reason, something resonated in something you send them and they made time in their diary.
And if you're now just willing to listen, they will tell you how to close them.
James Layfield. Thanks so much for coming on Indie Hacker, sharing your story, sharing
your wonderful advice and lessons. Can you let listeners know where they can go to find
out more about what's up to you and about what's going on with Clear Find?
Definitely. So James at clearfind.com or just find me on LinkedIn. I think it's just James
Layfield.
All right. Thanks again, James.
Thank you.