What's up, everybody? This is Cortland from ndhackers.com, where I talk to the founders
of profitable internet businesses, and I try to get a sense of what their story is like
and what's going on behind the scenes, so that the rest of us can learn from their examples
and from their mistakes. Today, I'm here with Philip Lahout. Philip, thanks for joining
me on the podcast.
Hey, thanks a lot, Cortland, for having me.
So the last time we talked was over a year ago. We did a tech interview for ndhackers
back in August of 2016. At that time, you were making $45,000 a month from conferencebadge.com,
and you had just switched over to working on your new app, Missive. So I have to ask,
13 months later here, how are things going with conferencebadge.com and with Missive,
and do you in any way regret switching from one to the other?
Yeah, it's pretty interesting because every time I talk about my story or the place I
am right now, people say, you know, you're really fortunate because most people want
to start businesses, right? I started the project three, four years ago now called conferencebadge.com,
and it went successful pretty quick. The thing is that I realized quite soon that the project
was major, people liked it, and they didn't really want to spend more time kind of adding
more features. At the same time, my partners, which at the time when I founded conferencebadge
with them, were actually working with me part time. And as soon as the project got successful,
I just wanted to work more and more with them. And one way to actually start working with
them was kind of tell them, we should just start working on something else, right? Just
on conferencebadge, which could be pay the bills, right? We could start, you know, trying
to find out the problems we're having and start, you know, acting around those. And
that's where Misiv was born. And after three years now, Misiv, you know, it's a really
ambitious project, but it's starting to grow now. And we're at a place where we're really
satisfied with the product. And, you know, what's funny is when I talk with Michael Funder
is that, you know, we've never been as motivated as we are today because we see the value and
our customers are really liking the product. So we're really fortunate to have conferencebadge,
which is still growing. We have one really awesome employees managing it. And then we
can focus most of our energy in that new project.
And how big is conferencebadge now? Because I know it was 45k a month a year ago.
Yeah, so conferencebadge right now, you know, it's a seasonal business, right? So conference
happened mostly autumn and spring, right? So summer is usually smaller amounts in terms
of revenues. But right now for next ocean, we're planning for around like between 80
to 90,000 US dollars, if it's going according to the plan.
So conferencebadge has been growing the entire time while you've been working on your new
thing.
Yeah. But I must say we didn't kind of stop working on it. I mean, we are still providing
what I consider to be like AAA customer support. And we're still listening to the small complaints,
you know, still things that are a bit too rough in the product are not good enough.
And we're making a really, really tiny improvement where the times where we really feel we could
improve it. So it's not like we just dump the project and let it die, really. It's still
being maintained, you know, daily by our employee. And we still, you know, from time to time,
invest a bit of time to fix some problems we find along the way.
So there's a very long and detailed history behind how you got to where you are today.
And I think while that's true in the case of every entrepreneur, the difference with
you is that the story is actually interesting all the way through rather than just being
interesting right at the end when you find success. Looking back at your story, it seems
like you're what you're really good at is taking one level of success and using it as
a springboard to reach an even higher level of success. Basically, you're just snowballing
all of your wins and accumulating even bigger wins, which is hard for a lot of people to
do because I think the normal way of being for most people is that if you find something
that works, you really put all your focus into just not losing it. Somebody has a stable
job that's paying them a healthy salary or they have a company that's making 50K a month.
Usually the last thing they want to do is take a huge risk and move on to something
new. But it seems kind of like the story of your entire life and it's worked out very
well for you. So why don't we start at the beginning of your story and walk through it
and see if we can gain some insights.
So let me start by asking what originally sparked your interest in tech and in business
and what were the first steps that you took to become an entrepreneur?
Yeah, so you know, I'm 33 years old now. So I was pretty much, you know, I grew up with
PC and the internet and my mother was a teacher. And so we had a computer quite early on in
my life. And the first, obviously the first thing I started to do was just, you know,
gaming, right? Like most kids, right? And I was gaming until I was like 14, 15 years
old. And at some point, you know, the internet got bigger. And we I don't remember that time
we had like a high speed internet connection, but my mother started to actually do website.
And one she did was for, you know, for our family tree, like genealogy, right? So she
started building that website and as a pretentious kid, I just, you know, kind of did laugh at
her skills saying like, mom, it's not good. It looks ugly, you know, and she laughed and
she fell off. She doesn't call me son, obviously she's a friend, but she says, son, you can
do if you can do better, just just, you know, start working. And then I, I took her to to
her own words and I just start creating website. And actually, the first one I ever created
this is something that ultimately got success and earned me quite a lot of money is that
I just start to look in on the internet for free, like all these games, you know, legal
games with free games, and I gathered all of them inside one website. And obviously,
I'm, you know, French Canadian, so I speak French. So the website was in French and there
was no other website, website doing that at that time. So quickly gather like, you know,
hundreds of visitors. And it was oh, like, at the time, it's called geo city of France
was called multi mania, that affair, like just those games there's and really grew slowly,
slowly to a point where, you know, I had like, Tyson's thousands of visitors a day. And I
didn't really know what I was doing, right? How did you decide to put together this website
of free games? Because I was also playing a lot of video games as a kid and making websites. And
that idea never occurred to me. Did you was it something that you were just making for yourself?
Or did you figure that it would be really popular with other people?
Or was it something that you were doing to learn the code? What was motivating you?
I think, well, I did it for myself. Funny thing is that I was a bit ashamed, right? Because,
you know, the cool kids I knew doing website were kind of doing website for their, you know,
Counter Strike clan or Starcraft clan. And it was they're like, creating a website for really old
games, no one really cared about, you know, at least for my inner circles of friends. So,
I don't know. I just, you know, it's been a long time. So I can't really answer that. But, you know,
it was just like available resources that I could gather, you know, and gather and expose the world.
So it's pretty much it, I think.
When did you notice that your website started picking up steam and people were actually
coming to visit?
You know, during that time, you still like like kind of some small, you know,
analytics tools, tell you how many visitors you had a day and things like that. And I think after
a week or two, I already had like 10 to 20 visitors. And already at that time, I was hooked,
you know, I wanted to post my link everywhere on the web. And trying to get I don't remember the
name, but there was kind of a place when you where you were listed on that website, you would like
kind of skyrocket your search engine rankings, I really work all together link there. And it
worked and slowly, you know, I was linked across hundreds of websites, because I was just literally
spent all my time posting the links everywhere. And it actually worked. And slowly, I just start
to work on the website, making making it look better, you know, without really knowing what
I was doing, you know, just there was, you know, resources in French were pretty rare at the time.
So I kind of had to learn English as I go to actually learn how to do things. And it's funny,
because on that time, you would see things on a website, and you would be like, Oh, my God, how
can they do that? You know, it's impossible, I have absolutely no idea. And then you would just
leave would take six months, but at some point, you would kind of you would click so he was, Oh,
that's it. It's just like an image cut and it's in a table, right? Yeah, so it's magic. But at the
end, it's not that hard. And so you go through all those steps. And at some point, you're kind of
becoming better. Yeah, you're just a kid reverse engineering all these websites. And you're,
it seems like you weren't on any sort of time pressure to like, I have to be, you know,
an expert programmer next month, or it's not worth it. You just took the time and didn't matter
to you if it was going to take six months for you to learn. And over the course of how many years
were you working on this website? Oh, you know, at least, you know, 10 years, you know, the stories
that it brought me a lot of money in the end, because initially started with cheap web page,
but at some point, I, you know, learn asa, asp, and it was it like on a Microsoft servers and
kind of make it more dynamic, add more content, and then switch to PHP. And it really picked up
a lot of traffic, you know, I think the biggest day I ever had was like 60,000 visitors. That's
huge. That's a lot of people I've never, I've never done something like that again. But, you know,
it was a point in time where if you were doing something new that was not available, you know,
everyone would kind of go looked at it, you know, I was kind of the one of the first
free games website in French, and it was just people were looking for that.
It's really interesting to look at the fact that building this website in French was so
advantageous for you, because you're really taking advantage of all the benefits of picking a niche.
The basic idea here is that you choose the target audience, and you build something that's so
specific and so good for them, that it really would make no sense for them to ever choose
a competing product. If you are a French Canadian looking for free games, and there's only one site
that's in French, then like, that's the one you're going to go to. And then there's a whole nother
advantage as well, which is that if you pick a niche, and you don't have that much competition,
then you don't have to make as many risky decisions. So if you think about the opposite
case, somebody who's in a market with a ton of competition, they're constantly thinking about
how they can stand out and differentiate themselves and do something new. And if you're doing all
these new unproven things, there's a high chance that they're going to flop. Whereas if you're in
a niche, and you don't have very much competition, you can just take an old tried and true idea that
you know is going to work and go with that. So I think you you did it right.
Well, I did it right. But I didn't know I was doing it right. It was just a lot.
It was just an hobby for me. So it wasn't really about money was, you know, at first didn't have
any hats on the internet. I didn't even know you could make money, right?
So how did you start making money? And how did you get to the point where you were reaching tens
of 1000s of visitors? Because I imagine that the strategies you started out with as a 15 year old,
you eventually improved on and got better at?
Yeah, well, the first you know, you know, it's pretty pretty soon, I think I had some affiliate
links to the website where people could kind of do worth downloading, like, I don't know,
it's probably spyware, but I would get a dollar per download and subscription. So you know,
I was making maybe making like, five to 10 bucks a day early on. And at some point, I experiment
with with with ads, so pay per click ads, and I just started to click on the ads myself like any
kids would do and see like, oh my god, I'm going to be rich like it. I'm already like at $100 just
need to click on more ads, right? And and I think it was a Canadian company. So they probably didn't
have like, really big frog detection tech at that time. So it took at least a month before they catch
me. And then they obviously I never saw a penny of that of that money because they kind of banned me,
but it was my first experience. And he kind of teach me, okay, you need to play by the rules,
don't be stupid. It doesn't work like that. And then slowly, you know, I was kind of making a bit
of money with athletes playing who wasn't that that big. But at some point, you know, as my
interest on the project was fading, because I was now at university playing rugby, football, I,
you know, was not really that interested anymore, didn't make that much money, right? My my friends
working at the bar was making more money than me. But then Google accents was released. And I put
it on the website. And instantly I switched from $10 a day to something like $300 a day. Whoa. And
that's completely changed kind of the game for me because it was like, well, I'm not that proud
about that project. And it's making me a lot of money now. So you were in college at this point,
did you consider making this your full time job? Because I think most people in that situation
would would be like, I don't need a job. I can if I'm making 300 bucks a day, let me just stick with
this and try to, you know, increase it. Yeah, yeah, obviously, I didn't work anywhere else. But I
didn't see that as like a legitimate project or business that could kind of throw I was kind of
always thinking it would just fold in a week or in a year, you know, it can't work really, I can't
be making money hosting free games on the internet, right? It can be possible. So you know,
it wasn't a time where entrepreneurship was that big, you know, at least in, in Canada, it wasn't
like, you know, it's not like said company today, you know, probably if I had that success at that
age, today, you know, it would be a completely different games, because people would advise me
to do things, right? As of that time, my my father was like, hey, son, you know, where's that money
coming from? Really, it can't be possible. What are you doing? Right? Are you sure it's legal? And
I was like, yes, legal. And I remember we even took advice, you know, we paid a lot of money to
get advice, because you hear that like, I since Google wasn't paying taxes in Canada, like the
government would go back to me and ask me to pay back, right? So, you know, I was putting in some
cash in case, you know, in five years, the government would come back and ask for for the taxes,
which, of course, you know, it was like, well, that everyone is, you know, is having Google
AdSense, you never want no people actually save money to pay the government. It's not a real
thing. Really, you know, it won't happen. It was like, you actually need to do that. I was like,
okay, okay. So he said, you know, I wasn't, I wasn't an entrepreneur at that time. I was just
still a kid like playing with with the internet. It wasn't like something. I wasn't thinking about
becoming an entrepreneur still at that point. It was just like, oh my god, I make a lot of money.
Yeah, it's fascinating how much our thought processes are shaped by kind of the conversations
going on around us and what other people are talking about. And if you don't hear anybody
talking about making websites and making money online as an indie hacker, then it totally makes
sense that you wouldn't really consider that to be a legitimate career or a path that you can
follow, you know, it just doesn't seem like a thing that people are doing. So did you ever,
you know, decide to get serious and eventually turn this into a full time job? And if not,
what did you decide to do? Well, clearly, I actually started to implement more features.
And, you know, it was 2004 now in 2005. And all the web to zero was started to kick in. And now I
could educate myself about entrepreneurship. And you know, it was, you know, all those blog about
technology and entrepreneurship were kind of exposing me to that world. And so at that point,
I kind of decided to build something on top of it. And since I wasn't considering myself as a,
you know, programmer or coder, I was just, you know, playing with things I didn't really know
about. I thought, well, I should hire someone. So I look for a computer engineer from the university
where I was studying. And I just asked him, well, do you want to work for me? So we're just going
to develop that website, I'm going to pay you pay hours, and it's going to be cool. And he said,
yes, and you don't even have to pay me a lot. But I'm going to develop, you know, my own,
you know, PHP framework on the side that I'm going to use on your website. It was like, yeah,
fine. That's awesome, right? So I didn't really know about, you know, I didn't, you know, I had
new absolutely nothing about Rails or Django. I think we're quite new at the time. So it was like,
yeah, why not? So it sounds like a really great idea. I do remember that at one point, I said,
well, why don't you use Django if it looks so awesome? It was like, no, you know, there's no
non in PHP, I want to do one, right? It was like, okay, makes sense. And it took like six months,
he rebuilt the website. And the idea was kind of to create something like congregate. So it was kind
of the YouTube a flash game. And I that was kind of my idea. So and we released the website, and
just really crashed. He couldn't, couldn't sustain the load of, you know, thousands of requests.
This guy's framework just wasn't good, huh?
Yeah, it wasn't good. It was absolutely no cash. You know, just, just if you were listing like
20 comments on the own page, you would like query the database, not only for each users,
but like for each propriety of each users, you know, one query for first name, one query for
last name, one query, like, so you know, and personally, I didn't really know about MySQL,
things like that. So I was kind of a copy paste snippet of code guy at that time. So I couldn't
kind of debug this myself at first. But that's really at the point where, you know, I realized,
well, the thing is that because I this website crashed for a couple of weeks, until we were able
to kind of fix it, I lost all my ranking on Google, right. And at the time, I was kind of,
you know, in between the third and the first rank, if you were typing, sure, so which is game in
Google, this is massive, you know, you know, I would have stick with that ranking, like just
two or three years later, I would probably been bought off for for 100 of 1000s of dollars,
because there was all those massive gaming website, you know, surfing the wave of web to
zero, and all those American company trying to get into other languages, right. So I would have
been like a perfect target to be bought off, right. But I just lost it because of my tech and
confidence. And that's really where I kind of told myself now, you know, it can be a service
business, it's your passion, you want to work on that now, you know it, but you need to educate
yourself, you can do tech if you don't speak the language. And that's really where I started to
learn coding by myself. And at first, it wasn't a passion, it was mostly I want to, you know,
create things, let's learn those language would let me, you know, create those things. But I
slowly fall actually in love with the actual craft of coding. I mentioned this earlier, but I think
a lot of people get discouraged when they think about learning to code or really learning to do
anything. Because it's so easy to just look around and see so many hundreds of people who are way
better than you are at this thing already. And so you're starting from way back. And people take
that and they say, you know, if I'm not ahead of the game, but in fact, I'm this far behind,
and then why even start? Did you deal with that at all? Or were you just gung ho?
Yeah, no, no, no, I deal with that a lot. You know, and funny story is that, you know, I,
my driving license, I got it like a 25. Right. And, you know, it was a bit of the same experience
as when I was trying to learn to go is that, you know, since I didn't start, let's say coding,
the normal path for me at that time would have been to go to computer and engineering, right.
And since I didn't went into that way, I kind of feel like it wouldn't be attainable for me,
right? Because I, you know, it was too late for me to choose that path, you know, at that time,
maybe stupidly, I didn't think it was possible for me to learn this, you know, by myself, I would
just always pretend to be a programmer since I would never been through all those engineering
course knowing like the deep stack and everything. So I would just always pretend to be one.
And it's the same thing with my driving lessons. It's that I was just procrastinating. It was like,
nah, you know, I don't have it. So just, you know, I need it, but I'm just gonna in six months,
right. And I feel it's the same for a lot of people when they try to learn something new,
is that they see the mountain instead of seeing like, well, you know, the first step to learn
something is really to just learn the few couple of simple things, simple concepts. And when you
master them, you can experiment with them, right, having fun with them. And it's often why I tell
people that that asked me if they should learn to code even if they're 26, 30 years old, I'm like,
yes, but you need to have fun in the process, you know, don't start to code to build like a
billion dollar company, you know, it won't happen. You know, learn to code to, to build a small
prototype, you know, you're getting wet, like build your own way, do the website yourself,
you know, it won't be that beautiful. But at least you would have some experience will know
if you like it, if you're going to be able to sustain hundreds of hours of non rewarding work,
right. So the first step is just to find your, your, your fun. And me personally, after, you know,
my website kind of crashed, and I didn't lose interest because we're still like making like
between 50 to $100 a day, which is kind of awesome, right. But I just start to, you know,
prototype small games and experiment with experiment with, you know, physics, you know,
particles, things that, you know, were really rewarding, you know, you code some things like
for six hours, then it animates in front of you. To me, that was kind of where I really got addicted
to programming is when I developed those small games where you could instantly see the magic
behind it, you know, it's it's it's it's endless the possibility you can actually achieve when you
you learn the craft of coding. So that's really when I get up to it.
That's funny. So you learned really to help your business out. So you wouldn't have to rely on
other programmers who are writing, quite frankly, crappy code that was crashing your website.
But your ambitions and your goals sort of ended up getting hijacked by the process of learning
code itself. And so you decided to go into what sounds like game development. What was your next
step after you got better at coding? Yes, yes, absolutely. And the funny thing is that all of
this happened. You know, I got really interested in the indie game space. And first reason, well,
you know, my background with my game website, I've always kind of checked those games, right?
Or at the time, most of those small prototypes were free. So we kind of put them on my website.
And that's where I found about the communities behind those games. And so there was like indie
indie games forums where people would, you know, kind of start to do challenge. And those
challenges are named game jam, right? So you would have like 48 hours, there would be a team and
everyone on the forum would come up with a game related to that team. And to me, it was mind
blowing was really something that that talked to me. And I really wanted to be part of that.
But it was really just a lurker. It wasn't really take, you know, it wasn't really part of the
community. But I was always there, you know, those lurker you never know about, but they're
always there because they, every day they go to the forum and they read everything. But I don't
know why I never really participate. But I started doing those experiments just for myself,
just to learn to code and still experiment. And I really got hooked to it and hooked to the vibe
of that community. The idea that you could just, you know, kind of in an artsy way, you know,
take your craft, your your coding craft and experiment with ideas and concepts. And then
not just, you know, like games, like pretty mainstream game mechanics, but really experiment.
What about if, you know, the game is all about just one button? You know, how far can the game
mechanics or the story of the games change, given we all have just that basic game mechanics,
which is just press one button, right? Like Flappy Bird is an example, like, it's a stupid game
mechanics, just press a button, but there's hundreds of thousands away, you can exploit
the press one button, you know, and different game mechanics. So this was really fascinating to me.
So I started to experiment on my own. And then at one point, I finished university. And I was like,
I don't know what I want to do. I feel like I want to become a game programmer. So I want to
have a game studio, but I feel I'm not, you know, the best one. I didn't student in engineering,
so I don't have all the skills. So I want to meet people doing that. So maybe I could be
the business guy, right? Since I've studied in business management. And if I meet those,
we can start a studio and it would be awesome. So at that point, I decided to actually meet those
people that the best way would be to organize a game jam in Quebec City. So that's my own time.
And to actually meet those guys, you know, that's what the people say, you need to meet co-founders,
you know, you need to meet people with talents, you know, and to me was really great idea. Well,
I was just going to create a massive game jam, like where every single developer is Quebec City,
what we want to go and they don't be awesome. It's so interesting because it's kind of similar
to your earlier idea where you put up that free website for games. And this is something that,
you know, had been done in other languages, but not in French. And here you are creating a game
jam for your city. And it's not like this is the most original unique idea that anyone's ever come
up with. This is something that you already saw working that was already exciting and getting a
lot of people motivated. And you wanted to bring that to your own city. And I think that's just
such like a great way to go about it. And the other thing I think that's so interesting as well is
I get a lot of people who come on the indie hackers forum and ask about how they can expand
their network or people who email me and say, you know, I've reached out to all these people,
but nobody's responding. Nobody wants to work with me, et cetera. And the common theme is that if
it's difficult for you to expand your network and to meet the people that you want to meet,
it's probably the case that you haven't really done anything impressive that shows that you're
serious about it. Whereas in your situation, like you immediately went into like, let me actually do
something. Let me create this giant game jam, which automatically makes you a pretty significant
person who's worth getting to know. Yeah, exactly. And I think you need to bring me to the game,
right? You need to bring something to the table. You can't just expect people with talents and
abilities to join you on nothing. You need to bring something to the table. And at that time,
I thought, well, I could be the business person. And by organizing the game jam would be like a
good way to prove people that it would be great to start a game studio with that guy because he
organized that big things. And the thing is that, you know, the game jam was called the bivouecia
of mine was kind of the urban campfire. And the idea was more than just the game jam. It was
really a festival. It would be music. There would be art displays. There would be the game jam. It
would all be held outside. So the game jam would be in big tops, and it would be held downtown. So
we had like that massive idea to create that big event. And I did it with one of my best friends,
at the time, an event planner. So it was really a good fit. So I had a vision. You had the ability
to manage the event. And then I managed the media, I raised the money, and he did all the technical
stuff to make the event happen, right? I was gonna ask if you had no event experience, how did you
do this? But it seems like you met the perfect person. Yeah, well, it's one of my best friends.
It's really, you know, now in Quebec is really one of the best to organize, you know, anything like
he can pretty much do anything with any budget, you know, if you ask him, he's gonna make it happen,
right? So the kind of people you wanted to business with. So we were kind of two guys who
would just go add add downs and do things. And in a matter of five months, the first year,
we met the mayor, I think I met like, really one big minister from the government.
You know, we had no prior experience or no, you know, no one knew us. But just by this year,
amount of work we put like sending a lot of females talking about the idea, we kind of
reached a lot of people in the government and at the city hall, and they all agree that it was a
great ideas, you know, Quebec was trying to kind of distance itself from Montreal as also a game,
you know, a game, you know, development cities. So Ubisoft was their Activision just bought like
Danax, which was, you know, a big independent studio that was, you know, a couple of other big
independent studios. So Quebec City had kind of that game industry. So I was really with that
idea, you know, game jam might be not a novel idea now, or even, you know, then on indie games
forum, but you know, to the general public was crazy, it was really awesome idea to let's create
gaming 48 hours, it can't be possible, right. So the idea is that we would bring the people from
the public to actually, you know, they could walk through the people coding their games during the
48 hours. And at the end, if could actually play those games, and it would be part of the charge
that judge the games. It was a really tremendous success. So we had press, you know, I think I did
live interview at CBC, like through all of Canada, in French, obviously, all networks were there, I
go to all, you know, radio shows talking about even who was a really good big success. But at
the end of the day was so much work that never really end up meeting or at least creating
friendship with game developers during, you know, during that time. So it was really frustrating to
me, because it felt like I just tapped into a really big train, but you know, I couldn't really
control it to my initial goals. Right. So your entire point was like, to network with people,
and you were not able to do the thing that you wanted to do. How big was the conference? Because
you said it was a huge success. And I know you ended up doing this for a number of years. Did
it grow from year to year? Was it sort of like an immediate hit? And it stayed the same?
Well, of course, financially was always hard. It's not the kind of events that, you know,
can make you rich. So we were actually paying ourselves any salary was just the reason I say
was successful is that we had, you know, support, you know, from everyone from the city to
government to private businesses to the game studios, everyone kind of chipped in not a lot
of money, but to make it happen, right. So at the end, I think last edition, it was like,
we had a budget of like $200,000, you know, to actually organize a game jam in Quebec City to me,
it's a huge success. You know, it's not like, it's not a la, it's not, you know, it's, it's,
it's not New York, it's a small city. So we had like 300 participants creating games.
How did you eventually decide to move on from the conference and start your next project?
So the last year of that conference, I told my business partner that I didn't want to do it,
I just was, you know, I didn't have the energy to do it, because I felt, you know,
it wasn't, you know, in line with my own goals. So I wanted to and now it was really kind of
becoming more like to start, you know, with companies and businesses. And I felt it's really
more what I wanted to do, right, I was seeing friends doing it. And I was, you know, of course,
you know, reading blogs and reading about all those success, right. So you want to join in,
you want to be part of that, since you know, you're an internet kids. So at that point, I told,
I told him, I don't want to do it. But in the end, he said, Well, what if I do most of the work,
and you can just experiment the event yourself and actually create a game,
and you just need to deal with the media during the event. And you can actually, you know,
build your own team and be part of the event yourself. And I was like, well, that's a bright
idea. Actually, I can kind of experiment my own creation. So that's what I did. And the funny
story is that I actually end up partnering with people that were working on my board in space.
And those guys are now my business partner for for conference batch and missive. So it did end up
working, right. So it wasn't the game industry was at the end of the day, was mostly in web
technology. But I did end up actually kind of not met, but at least create kind of friendship
relation during that event. Okay, so what did you end up doing after the event was over? Well,
after the event, we I was thinking about what can I do against this? It's always a question. So,
and at that time, my gaming portal wasn't making any money anymore. Because you know, with with
iOS, and, and it was kind of the mess, it was the end of the flash game era, or free game around
on the engine, everyone was playing with iPad games or iPhone games, right. So, so that was,
I wasn't making any more money, right. So I was thinking that I needed to come up with an idea
that could actually help me pay the bills. And I was juggling with with a lot of different ideas.
And one day, I kind of stumbled upon my friend, so one of my best friend, the one who organized
the bewap with me. And he was in his apartment with his business partner. So they were actually
now a real event organizing company. And they were kind of printing name badge with using like
a real old Windows program that they said they paid $500 for. What you paid $500 for software
really, it looks that ugly. And and at that time, I remember it. So I helped them like to it. And
then I remember how painful it was for us, like few hours before each decision of the bewap to
actually print the name badges, because you need to deal, you know, with last minute attendees,
and the templates never really works. It's always, you know, complicated, and you have no time for
it. So I said, that's it, man, I'm going to build a name badge, you know, tool. And it's a totally
unsexy idea, right? So, you know, now it seems really cool, but, you know, because it's making
money. But at the time, my friends were like, really, you know, build a name badge tool.
That sounds strange, but okay. And so I just started to develop it using the Eventbrite API.
And then I quickly realized that although I had the skills to build like kind of the JavaScript
editor, to build your name badge template online, and then generate a PDF with it, I think I like
some some design skills. So I asked my people who actually did the bewap last edition with me
to to actually join me and form a partnership. And these are these are people from your
coworking space. Exactly. So this is what's happening at the coworking space, which was
which I actually founded. So yeah, so we start working on it. And after like five months,
just a few weeks before we release the app, we receive an email from Mitch Coleran at Eventbrite.
And he's just, he's asking, Are you I think, if I quote him literally was like,
are you doing what I think you're doing? Because he saw like our app name when we were querying
the dev API at Eventbrite, and was like, yeah, we're building a name badge tool. And he said,
I didn't call you. So I set up the call. And so like, this is awesome. It's like, you know,
it's the most painful thing like our users faces. And you know, our engineering team has no time
to deal with just, you know, aspects of the product. So you really gonna solve a big pain.
So I'm gonna promote the hell out of you guys when you release. So we were like, whoa, okay,
so you know, so part of our success was really to kind of build the product around an ecosystem,
and to bring value to that ecosystem. So it's really where I see the initial reason why we had
we had, you know, success that fast, it's just because we provide the value to Eventbrite.
And you know, what's funny is that they never asked for money or commission. So people always
ask us, so how much money you give Evanbrite? We don't, you know, it's just like we provide
value to them. Like people now, it's one more reason to use Evanbrite. When you use Evanbrite,
you pay fees, right? You know, they don't care if on top of that, they give us money because we
manage the name badge, but their solution now has more value.
Yeah. So one win for everybody involved. Did you have a plan for how you're going to
find customers and distribute your product before you talk to Eventbrite? Because at this point,
this is your really your third big project that you've worked on. You had your free games website,
you had your bivouac conference, or bivouac game jam, which was a super huge success. You know,
what kind of lessons did you take from those earlier successes? And how did you bring those
into conference badge? The reality is I did a lot of different things before that didn't work,
and I just didn't talk about them. So my game portal, I launched it like in many languages,
and you know, I never had like more than two visitors. I started like, you know,
software businesses. I started a lot of things that never really went nowhere before that.
But no, I had absolutely no plan on how to promote a conference badge when I was developing it.
Most people would tell you if you build something people, if you build something,
right, people won't come, right? In a sense, it's not what happened with me, right? It's I never,
I was never a really good marketer. I'm not that good to, to tell stories. I'm not a teacher. So,
you know, so I'm not the best one to talk about the value of something, you know,
I get lost in my own words. So it wasn't was really always about focus, focusing on,
on building something great. And, and it's probably luck in some sense. But of course,
my success are not massive success, you know, there are still small scale success, right?
So that's probably the difference, you know, you know, of course, if you build something,
something great, some people will show up, maybe you want, you know, become as big as possible.
But I would say I'm never really focused on that. It was really about building something
that work. And every time we had a customer, we were like, giving him like triple a service,
if he was having some technical problems, we wouldn't go to sleep until it was fixed,
you know, if someone at a conference, and he wanted like last minute badges with QR code,
and we didn't have feature, we would like kind of not sleep until it was shipped, because that guy
needed it, you know, we didn't want to let him down. So it was really about nurturing the few
customers we add. And then I think it's just word of mouth, plus Evanbrite. But now Evanbrite is like
35% of for for traffic, and we never really advertise the solution. So I think it's really
word of mouth that comes into play, like people who use the product are like, you know, it saves
me a lot of time, because you know, some people on road shows, doing events, like every week,
they just like to lose so much, so much time, you know, printing badges just hours before the
event. Now it's just it's all cooked in baked in it just need to, to order and that's it that you
reuse the same template, the importer attendees from Evanbrite is like, they would play like,
I think some would be like 10 times the price they're paying now because it's just, it's so
it brings so much value to them. So I think it's very interesting what you're talking about,
because you did almost all of like the perfectly right things in order to spark word of mouth
growth. And you have this, you know, this belief that like, a lot of people think, okay, if you
build it, they will come, which is often railed against, like you need to actually have a marketing
plan. And, but to some degree, it can be true. And the form of word of mouth grows if you do
the right things. So if you're targeting a specific niche, where all of your customers tend to hang
out in the same place, like eventbrite, or all the conference organizers know each other,
or they're on meetup.com or something, then your product is a lot more likely to be able to spread
via word of mouth, because those people actually talk to each other. Versus if you have a product
that targets people who are like teachers and construction workers and professors, like they
don't really talk to each other. So it's really hard to spread. Right. And on top of that, you
guys built this great product that solved a pre existing problem. And if you can build something
that really solves a problem, then people might just find you on their own. If people are already
hosting conferences, then you know what, they're googling name badges, and they're gonna look at
the options and pick the best one. And if your option is there, then suddenly you don't have to
do all that much marketing and sales to really get in front of them. So it looks like you guys
checked all the right boxes. Yeah. And what's interesting is that, you know, although I said
this with conference badges, I had no marketing plans that would miss it on the other end. It's
kind of a completely different space. You know, the problem is not that obvious. It's a generic
public, you know, it's a generic app to actually, you know, manage your team communication. So is
it like if people are not looking for that, right? So, you know, that the interesting story, I think
is that now we kind of are morphing ourselves to more like marketers, because that's the only way
you can grow a business like missive. You need people to talk about it, right? You need to find
creative way to make people talk about it. Because even if it's great, you know, if you
want to spark, you know, of course, our goal is to let you know, we do have, you know, kind of virality
in some world smart growth. But the reality is that if you want to spark that initially,
you still need to improve your marketing skills. So just for some context, can you describe to
everybody what missive is and how you ended up deciding to stop working on conference badge,
at least as much as you were and to start working on missive? Yeah, okay. So the interesting story
is that, as we grow conference badge, I was not, you know, it was like a part time partnership with
my co funders. And at some point, we were making enough money to work full time on conference
badge or something, right? And as creative guy types of person of people, we were like, well,
let's work full time, pay ourselves a conference badge, but leave the door open to explore other
problems or opportunities, right? Just try to, to come up with something else that might be,
to us more interesting to work on or just to, to, you know, to keep us interested in our,
in our work. So at that time, we conference but start to grow. And we were dealing with a lot of
customer support, you know, emails from Evan Brides, partners, and, you know, our daily life
was mostly in our email client. And then we start to use something like at the time with hipjack,
but, you know, today you would probably use Slack. So that chat up where, you know, we, a lot of
what's happening. So we were chatting about how we should implement features. We were chatting
about some of our customers request email. We were chatting about, you know, emails received
from Evan Brides. We wanted us to, to deal with something. And it ended up what we found out that
would be, we ended up with, you know, two big, massive slides of communication. And, you know,
we just felt, well, that might be a place, an opportunity where we can actually bring some value.
What if, you know, we, what if we've emerged back those two silos together, right? So,
so the idea of the, I miss it is that it's an email client. It's a really powerful email client.
Okay. So it does everything you expect from an email client. It's news, it understand,
it does, it does all those things, right? But instead of having email trades, what do you
get is conversation and conversation can be composed of either emails or chat messages or
a mix of both. So it's a really generic app. Okay. It's, it's a team communication app that merge
email and chat, but it really can help you deal with a lot of scenarios like customer support.
You don't really need a nail desk when you work on missives, because you can actually collaborate
around emails received from customers, right? You can, you can draft replies together with your
teammates, right? The chat app, well, in missive, it's straight out of the conversation. So you can
kind of scope your topics. You can use the powerful tools from the email clients, like you
can snooze the chat conversation. So you could create a task in your chat conversation, like pay
taxes and snooze it in 31 days. And then in 31 days, you can type like, Hey guys, I just paid the
taxes. And it brought all the possibilities to our daily workflows. And as, as, as we developed it,
which, you know, we realized, Oh, we really liked that problem. And we really like, uh,
the solution we came up with. So the more we were working on it, the less we were working on
conference badge. And it was clear for us at some point that I would be our main activity,
like missive would became our main activity. And, and it's, you know, it wasn't like instantly we
switch, but now it's like 95% for work is missive. That's so fascinating. And it's, I think much more
clear to me what you were talking about earlier, which is that you really have to kickstart an idea
like missive to get it to grow. If you look at conference badge, it has a whole bunch of factors
working in its favor. It was targeting a problem that already existed. And so people were already
searching for the solution and your solution to that problem, although it was well-designed,
it was also super simple and straightforward and easy to understand. And you guys also were
targeting a niche in which everybody's kind of related. These are all event organizers.
So they talk to each other and make recommendations and therefore your product can grow via word of
mouth. And they also hang out in single hubs, like Eventbrite. So you can reach large numbers
of your customers all at once. Missive on the other hand is missing a couple, if not all of
those factors. I mean, you're doing something completely new here. So people are not necessarily
searching for, I need a collaborative email editor so I can draft replies at the same time
as my coworkers. They don't even know that they want something like that. So I guess you have
to go out of your way to educate them and teach them that this is a possibility that exists and
can make their lives better before you could even make the sale. Yeah, exactly. And something we
found out is that most product in that space, like really successful product, like Basecamp, Slack,
Asana, every single founder is those companies add fame, either fame or previous massive success,
right? Slack has got to be on Flickr, right? Well, Basecamp, it has those podcasts, books,
it built Rails, so it has this massive followership. It's the same if you look at all those
successful kind of business. They kind of use their own followers to bootstrap their business,
which is not something we have, right? So when you're facing an issue like that, you need to look
at what are your own advantage? So I don't have a big audience. It's a generic public product,
but I do know that there's a lot of value because I experimented. I believe strongly in it,
and there's no way we're going to stop. It's the same for the three founders.
So what we told ourselves is like, let's take the couple of inbound leads we have every week,
right? Let's talk with them one and one. Book a call every time, and let's talk with them,
see what's missing in the product, what the value could they get, why are they interested and
missive in the first place? And having those conversations for now a year and a half, it
changed a bit the course of the development roadmap, right? And each time we listened to
customers and we brought some more value to them, it really changed the growth curve of
missive. It was like if people, because when we launched initially, we had a kind of big
spark of like few thousands of people looking to it, never really stick to the product.
But now every time we launch a new features, we actually know a lot of people actually want this.
So by listening to what the people who were interested in missive, even if it wasn't big,
if no one's kind of like famous person was saying like, it's the way to actually manage your
business, use missive, they were still interested and wanted to know why and what was preventing
them from switching. And by listening to them, and this is our advantage, right? We're passionate,
I think we're a good product. We're good at making good looking and productive product.
So we took those advice, we talked a lot with them and then we invest all our time in improving
the solution and slowly starting to pay off. Of course, we're trying to improve our marketing
skills. But still, I don't know in five years, if I look back, you know, it's still an open end
question. But I maybe I'm still gonna say, well, the answer is just to build something that is
damn good, you know? Well, at the very least, you guys can be sure that you're solving a problem
that at least some people have because you had this problem. And you're really just scratching
your own itch here, which means that you can easily test it and see okay, did this make my
life better? Now, that doesn't necessarily mean that everyone else has the same problem that you
did that they want the same solution that you want in the way that you guys want it. But at least
you're starting off on the right foot, you're starting off on a good place and you can build
from where you are. But I must say that now we're at a place where we do have really interesting
revenue with missives. So it was like six months ago, it was still, you know, a big leap of fate.
But now it's like, we're well seated, you know, it's like we know people are willing to pay and
we just really need to scale this. How much would you say that you really had to change the product
itself to get it from where you started to a point where it's, you know, was really gaining traction
and you guys had a lot more confidence? Well, yes, something we realized that people, you know,
we were seeing like missive as a mashup between an email claim and a chat application. And the
thing that was missing was people find it really great, but they were telling us like, well,
that's cool. But I still, you know, I still end up, you know, my email is mostly my task list.
I do so many things. And it would be really interesting and missive if that task list,
those emails are not just asked for myself. A lot of time is that's related to my coworkers, right?
So the ability to chat around those is nice, but it would be cool if I had more guidance. So if I
could, you know, assign a conversation to someone or create a task, you know, an inline task in the
comments of an email conversation and assign this to someone. So when we brought the concept of
assignment in missive, it really completely changed the conversation with customers.
And when we introduced this, people were like, okay, now, you know, I will definitely try that
with my team. Okay. And, you know, the difficulty with the product like missive is that, you know,
obviously you don't need to convince just one person, you need to convince everyone in the team.
And that's the art part. And I think I remember reading an interview from Slack founder and said
the same thing. Obviously he had a lot of success doing it, but he said like the artist part is
just you need to convince everyone. That's just the perfect fit for their team.
So what are your goals with missive and the long term? Because unlike like conference badge and
like a free game site and even your game jams, this really seems like something that has the
potential to have a lot more reach. I mean, pretty much everybody uses email. And if you can build a
better email client, then that's a lot of potential users. So are you guys considering
raising money to try to go faster? Or do you just want to bootstrap it and get like a small
slice of a huge pie? Or what are you optimizing for in terms of the outcome?
I don't have a long term plan. I never really did any plan, right? Anything I did, right?
So I don't have a long term plan. I do see the value of VC money, if you already have
traction and you need to scale a winning recipe, right? Which I think like we still have yet to,
we're not yet at that moment. So I don't think I would be interested in a discussion with VC
at the moment. But if we do reach a point where it's a winning recipe and it's clearly laid out
and you just need to put money on top of it to make it grow, why not? But at the moment,
it's continuing what we're doing to get to a point where it reaches potential. Because
I do have those calls with my customers and they really are enthusiastic about the product.
So it's really our goal to put the product in more hands. So that would be the short term
goal. But long term goals, why not make it as big as possible?
So we're getting close to the end of our hour here. But to wrap things up,
it's been really interesting looking at all of your successes over the years.
And I know we skipped over a lot of failures. Maybe we'll have to do another episode and talk
about those as well. But I think there's probably more to be learned from the successes. Because
you're really good at every industry that you're in, taking a look at what was working and what was
broken, and building something even bigger off of the back of that. So when you had your free game
site, you know, that turns you on to the game jams, and you ended up building like this humongous
event for yourself and for so many other people. And then you got into the event space because of
that. And you're able to find out, okay, you know, here's what's broken with events. And here's this
massive opportunity to create conference batch calm and really, you know, make a lot of money
helping people solve this terrible problem that yourself had. And then as you continued working
with your team, it became apparent to you that email was really broken for your use case. And
it didn't support collaboration very well. And so you ended up coming up with the idea for missive.
What are your tips for people who aren't as good as you are at coming up with ideas
for themselves to work on? How can they use their experiences to look at the world around them like
you have and identify the problems that are worth solving? I would say, do try to have fun in what
you're doing. You know, sometimes being too, too serious is hard to to make it on the long term,
lower expenses, I saved a lot of money, which enabled me after university to experiment a lot
with either code or the work. And I experiment for two years because of the money I've saved,
I've never really spent any money on, you know, big things. You know, that's really interesting,
because saving money is something that I don't think we talk about enough. But it's really good
advice. Because what it ends up doing is it takes pressure off of yourself to have to succeed and
the short term, which is not only stressful and no fun, but it also compromises your judgment and
prevents you from really being able to experiment and take the time to build something that people
will find valuable. Yeah, I think that's actually really good where you just say you're pretty good
at summarizing other people's thoughts. Don't put too much pressure on yourself actually,
either financially or emotionally, you know, because it's it's hard to deal with the pain of
not feeling you're successful and seeing people around you having success. So yeah, lower the
pressure. Keep, you know, good mental state and experiment. You know, that's what I did as well.
I always do is experiment, try things, you know, either with code or your life. That's pretty much
it. All right. Well, I think that is a great note to end on. And I had a really good time talking to
you. Can you tell listeners where they can go to find out more about you personally, and about the
things you're working on like conference badge and missive? Yeah, well, I don't tweet a lot,
you can follow me on Twitter, it's D L E H O U X and else it's missive app dot com or conference
badge dot com. All right. Thanks, Philip. It was good to talk. If you enjoyed listening to this
conversation, and you're looking for a way to help support the Andy hackers podcast,
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