What's up, everybody?
This is Cortland from IndieHackers.com, and you're listening to the IndieHackers podcast.
On this show, I talk to the founders of profitable internet businesses, and I try to get a sense
of what it's like to be in their shoes.
How did they get to where they are today?
How did they make decisions, both of their companies and their personal lives, and what
exactly makes their businesses tick?
And the goal here, as always, is so that the rest of us can learn from their examples and
go on to build our own profitable internet businesses.
Today, I'm talking to Ryan Bourne of CloudCampaign.
Ryan, welcome to the show.
Hey, Cortland.
Thanks so much for having me.
Thanks for being here.
Super excited to have you here.
You are kind of my favorite type of guest to interview, because I've seen you grow up
on IndieHackers.
Two years ago, you're on the forum, you're emailing me with ideas, you're excited to
get started on something, you're making approximately zero dollars a month in revenue.
Back then, what's your revenue at now?
Yeah, so we actually just crossed 25k MRR, which we're super excited about and growing
by about 32% month over month.
32%?
That's crazy.
Yeah, it's been a really exciting journey with most of our growth coming in the past
few months here.
How does it feel to go from being sort of a fledgling IndieHacker to being someone who's
actually doing it?
Because I know in those early stages, it can kind of just feel like a dream that one day
I'll have these kind of revenue numbers and one day I'll work for myself, but now you're
actually here.
Yeah, it's super interesting.
I think it feels fragile at times, I feel like we've accomplished a lot and looking
back to two and a half years ago when I first started the company, it feels like we've done
so much, but at the same time, it feels like it could go away at any point.
Hopefully that's not the case, but honestly, that's how it feels.
Yeah, the typical founder anxiety can all come crashing down.
Yeah, you think of every worst case scenario and not what hopefully is actually going to
happen, which is you keep growing at the same pace.
I very rarely encounter founders who actually have that kind of worst case scenario thing
happen, where overnight their business is dead, but I so often encounter founders who
have that fear and that belief that it can happen.
It seems like it never goes away.
I listened to how I built this, the podcast, the NPR, and even folks that are interviewed
on there that are valued at a billion dollars, it seems like they still have that same fear.
Totally.
Stripe has a list of doomsday scenarios, what are the things the CEO is worried about?
And those are very real threats that can really tank and kill any business.
You see it happen with these huge unicorn startups all the time.
WeWork was going to IPO a few months ago, now they're worth very little money and trying
to scramble and save the company.
It's real, but at the same time, I think if you're building especially a bootstrapped
indie hacker business off the back of hundreds or thousands of paying customers and you've
sort of grown at a healthy clip, which you've done, that's a little bit of security, a little
bit of insurance where you know you've built on the back of something real and it's not
just inflated valuations and fake numbers.
I think so too, and I think it's something that we're trying to be pretty deliberate
about in terms of building a business that is being funded by our customers.
I think just for full transparency, we're actually in the process of raising a seed
round right now, which isn't very typical for indie hackers, but we see it as kind of
augmenting our growth.
But at the end of the day, we're still trying to fuel our salaries and fuel the business
based off our customers and our revenue.
Cool.
So I want to talk about how you got here because you first popped onto my radar way back in
like early 2017, when you were on an indie hackers forum and in my inbox.
But I don't really know much about what you're up to before that point in time.
So what were some of the most important events that led to you becoming a founder and wanting
to be an indie hacker?
Super fortunate paths.
I graduated college in 2014 and studied computer engineering at that point.
I joined an early stage startup.
We were series A funded, 14 employees, and just got to see firsthand that whole experience
of growing the company and getting to go in every day and make a pretty significant difference.
And I think that was really exciting for me.
I was super fortunate to go through an acquisition there, join the acquiring company, which had
about 2,500 employees, stayed there for two years, and at that point we took the company
public.
So I think it was just very serendipitous.
I was so fortunate to be able to join the company at that stage and have that experience.
And I think that's what really opened me up to entrepreneurship and wanting to start my
own company afterwards.
Yeah, you kind of saw every stage of success from being a tiny NASA company to being acquired
to IPO-ing.
Do you think that everything going so well there is kind of what inspires you to do your
own thing, and maybe things that crashed and burned, more like a typical startup that you
wouldn't have done it?
It's a big part of it for sure, just instilling confidence in myself to do it.
But also financially, anytime you go through an exit, obviously it's a good financial
situation for yourself, and so that helped having a bit of savings and cushion to then
take the leap to then start my own company.
I think another thing to note too is both my parents are entrepreneurial, so having
that background and seeing that growing up and seeing that you can actually build a good
business where you kind of set your own hours and whatever else was pretty inspiring.
I think a lot about inspiration because that's kind of the chief goal of Indie Hackers, to
get people to want to start more companies and tell people that they can do it.
And so much of it just comes down to seeing relatable examples of people doing it and
sort of demystifying it.
So it's not just these mysterious figures on TV and in books, but it's actually people
that you know and you can think, this person isn't that different from me.
I could have done it.
So having parents who are founders or being part of a company that succeeds and talking
to those founders is super inspiring.
What was the first thing that you did to start down this path of being a founder after the
acquisition happened and after the IPO?
Yeah, so first step was really just kind of creating side projects that I was really interested
in.
I knew I wanted to start a company, I just didn't know which project was going to turn
into a company, which I think is almost a good way of doing it because it's kind of
low stress and it doesn't have to necessarily work out.
You don't need it to be a huge success from day one and so I actually launched a few different
projects while still working at that company, the acquiring company.
I think it's also a good test to then see when you actually do get some sort of traction,
you have something to compare it against.
Project C got a ton of users on day one.
That's something I haven't seen before with project A and B. Maybe it's actually worth
pursuing this with a bit more time and a bit more effort and so that was kind of the first
step was just building these projects on nights and weekends.
My favorite approach to getting started is kind of the scatter shot, shotgun approach.
Do lots of different things.
Don't go all in on your first project on day one and think it has to be perfect because
then you don't get that perspective of seeing the differences between different projects
and I think there's a lot of value in just starting over from scratch and sort of doing
that whole beginning process again because then you get to see what you did last time,
what didn't work and how to refine it.
When you're going through this process of starting projects, were you that deliberate
and that conscious of having a strategy and how it was going to work in a long time or
were you just sort of following your passion and seeing what happened?
Initially it was just following my passion and seeing what would happen.
So initially it was kind of scratching my own itch.
Projects that I wanted to exist in the market but didn't.
It's funny actually.
So one of the first projects I was working on was called IPNo, it was like an IPO notification
service that would send you an email any time a company filed to go public and I posted
on IndieHackers and this was like early 2017 and I remember you actually reached out to
me I think on the forum and gave me feedback and you're like, well, why does anyone care
about this?
Why does someone want to buy this?
What's the value that they're getting out of it?
I was like, I don't know, it's something I want so I built it.
I'm not sure what the value is.
I think that's a great lesson though is like if you expect people to pay for it they have
to begin value out of it and actually has to solve some sort of problem.
It's cool that you were so forward about sharing what you were doing.
You weren't just sort of building an isolation.
You decided to come on IndieHackers and share your ideas with people which led to you actually
getting valuable feedback and learning a little bit more than you would have if you just did
it in isolation.
What do you think were some of the more valuable lessons that you learned from that early phase
of just trying lots of different ideas?
I think from the early days, things that I learned were really pitching the value.
So just kind of around messaging and I think it's something I'm still learning today but
if you just tell someone what the product is, no one's going to buy it.
They're not interested in the product.
They're interested in the sizzle.
You don't sell raw meat, you sell the burger that someone's going to eat.
I think that was one big thing that I learned in the early days is what's the value that
you're selling and the whole pitch needs to be around that whenever you're talking to
a customer.
So your background is in software engineering, right?
Yep, that's correct.
Yeah, this is not something that I teach you in your computer science classes.
This is not something you want on the job and you're writing code.
You're very product focused, you're building features.
It's all very concrete and then when you start to wear the hats that a founder has to wear
and you're doing marketing and sales, suddenly it's all about how do you communicate with
people and how do you transfer a message and a vision that you have in your head and to
their head and how do you even predict whether or not that's going to resonate and that's
something that they want.
Yeah, marketing is tough.
I think I actually gained a lot of respect for some of these other job functions through
starting a company because I just never really realized how difficult and how hard it was
to actually measure the success of these different roles.
And to your point, you're 100% right in that in engineering, you're taught to actually
remove all the fluff and be very direct and say, this is a table, not like this is the
gathering spot where you eat dinner with your friends.
It's just a different way of approaching it.
Yeah, I think another thing about being an engineer, especially in a high tech startup
is you sort of end up being prized above the other roles, people exalt engineering.
It's all about the programmers, they have the highest salaries, they're what makes Silicon
Valley work.
And I've really bought into this for a long time.
And then coming to the other side of things, I realized that a lot of companies say this
because it helps them hire engineers, it's very difficult to hire engineers.
And so you really need to do that.
But the other functions that a company are just as important, if not more important,
what the marketing department does to actually get the product in customers' hands is extremely
crucial.
And it's easy to lose sight of that as a founder and sort of say, well, as long as I build
a good product, that's all that matters.
And all this marketing and sales stuff is just BS.
Yeah, no, it's so true.
And ultimately, the only reason you're working on the product is to generate more sales,
right?
If the product's selling and selling my caulkakes, then don't focus any more effort on engineering.
Just keep selling it until it gets to the point where it's not selling anymore and then
start working on the product again.
And I guess anecdotally within our company, I'm actually the only engineer working on
the product today.
Everyone that we've hired has been within sales because the product sells fine.
It's relatively good compared to the rest of the products on the market.
And so we just focus all of our effort and our revenue on growing sales.
So tell me a little bit about your product and your team.
You're doing 25k a month in revenue.
What is Cloud Campaign exactly?
And how many people are working on it alongside you?
Cloud Campaign is a digital platform that helps marketing agencies scale social media
management.
So to kind of give you an idea, most of the big brands they're familiar with today, actually
84% of enterprises actually hire a marketing agency or freelancer to then manage their
social media.
And we're building a product that allows these marketing agencies and freelancers to manage
social media at scale.
So just making them more efficient, really focused on both the front of the house and
back of the house.
So making them look a lot better and have a white labeled product that they can present
to their clients.
But also making them more efficient so the account managers in some situations can even
double the number of brands they manage, which obviously affects the bottom line of the business.
And it's a pretty compelling story when it comes to actually selling these marketing
agencies on our product.
It's funny because this pitch that you're giving right now is so different than the
way you described Cloud Campaign to me over email like two years ago.
Back then when you had the initial idea, it was nothing like that.
You were reaching out to founders, or at least me, trying to get us to use Cloud Campaign.
And you're basically saying, hey, this is a way to automate all of your social media.
This is the best way.
You use this instead of Buffer, you use this instead of MeetEdgar, et cetera.
How did you come up with the initial idea back then?
Yeah, so it was a different product at that time.
And we've since then pivoted.
The thought was, it was really, it was a race to the bottom, if I'm being completely honest.
We're like, oh, we can build a better mousetrap and we can sell it for $5 rather than $40
or whatever it was.
And yeah, so what we realized is no one really wanted to pay for it.
There were enough solutions out there today that had respected brand value and they were
name brands that people were familiar with.
And so we had a really hard time breaking into the market, even at a lower price point.
And my thought was, okay, let's take a step back and let's actually do some customer research,
which is something I didn't do from day one.
I think that was my biggest regret, was just building the product once I had some people
expressing interest in it and not actually talking to those folks and saying, hey, what
are you hoping to get out of this product?
I'm just like, oh, they said they're interested?
They saw my landing page?
All right, let's build it.
The engineering mindset.
And so yeah, I started reaching out to some friends that worked at some larger enterprises
that were in the marketing space and pretty much asked them, hey, what would it take to
get you to use my product?
And they're like, oh, it looks awesome, but we outsource.
We hire a marketing agency that actually does our social media.
And that was kind of the light bulb moment.
It's like, okay, if we sell one marketing agency that opens the door for maybe 30 enterprises,
that's the route that we want to go and really pivot it.
And that's about six months into being full time on the product.
So I want to rewind a little bit and talk about some of the logistics behind going from
being a full-time employee to being a full-time ND hacker.
At some point, I assume you left your job.
How did that happen exactly?
Yeah, left is a nice way of putting it.
They actually shut down our entire office, so technically I got fired.
We're kind of operating as a satellite office at that point.
This was about two and a half years after we got acquired.
And they decided that they were going to move our product up to a different office in Vancouver.
And they pretty much gave us the option to either move to Vancouver or quit or get fired,
essentially.
Which is a blessing to this guy.
This was actually the day after I launched the website for Cloud Campaign.
And it's a pretty funny story.
So I show up to work and it's pretty abnormal for HR to actually be in our office just the
way we operated.
And HR is in our office.
They call everyone to an all hands meeting in the conference room.
Go in there and I had a feeling this was coming.
And sure enough, they're like, hey guys, we're super impressed by everything you've done.
But at this point, we're moving the product to this other office and yada, yada, yada.
Meanwhile, my phone is just going crazy because I had set up email notifications every single
time a new customer, or not a customer at that point, but someone expressed interest
in the product, signed up.
And so I keep just getting all these notifications on my phone.
I was like, what?
What's going on?
I like slightly pulled out underneath the table and I see it's like, oh, this person
is interested.
This person is interested.
This person.
I was like, all right.
Maybe this is what I needed.
This is the push to go full time on it.
I was like, all right, I'm off payroll in a couple of months.
We had a couple of months to move the product over.
And at that point, it was just working tirelessly, nights and weekends, to get something demonstrable
and MVP out there that we can actually start selling.
And yeah, that was really the first step, was actually getting fired.
Still a pretty big leap to go from working full time for another company and having a
cushy salary and knowing there's going to be a paycheck every couple of weeks to suddenly
being on your own.
And I guess you had savings, right?
It was your company at IPO'd and you've done a little well.
But at the same time, now your savings, instead of being increasing, they are now dwindling
every month.
How did you plan for having a runway, psychologically and just financially?
Yeah, I think a big thing was just step one, figuring out how much money I had in different
stocks and savings accounts and whatever else and mapping out where that could potentially
get me.
I think my estimate was off pretty significantly, but I was like, all right, I have a car payment,
I have rent, I have whatever else.
These are my must haves that I need the money for to pay each month.
And then I can probably reduce my variables quite a bit if I eat in and don't get coffee
and whatever else.
And so just essentially step one was mapping out where I could get to with my savings.
But then the next step was actually figuring out how I'm going to afford everything else.
So obviously, there's a lot of benefits I come with working for an employer like healthcare
and like you mentioned payroll and whatever else.
And so step one was figuring out all those different logistics.
And so I think this is something that a lot of folks struggle with making that transition.
And what I ended up doing, just because at that point, I didn't have payroll anymore,
I went on to cover California, which is like Medicare, right?
It's for low income people to like get government funded healthcare.
So I moved on to that.
The first step then was to actually get the company off the ground and make it like legal
was going through Stripe Atlas.
They just launched at the time, it's like 500 bucks, you can incorporate your company.
They connected me with a lawyer to then actually go and do all the legal docs.
And so that was kind of the first step was just getting all the ducks in a row and making
sure everything was legal.
And I could move forward with it at that point.
Yeah, that makes a lot of sense.
A lot of people struggle with these early decisions.
I think it's easy to not get started because it sounds so overwhelming.
But the fact that people like you figured it out, you shared your story, the fact that
things like Stripe Atlas exist to make it significantly easier to get started with at
least sort of the boring business, healthcare side of things.
The rest of it's still pretty confusing.
What kind of ideas should you work on?
How do you get your architecture set up for your code?
What are the first things you're going to do?
How are you going to find customers?
Did you have a plan for all that sort of stuff when you started cloud campaign?
The nice thing is I feel like the day and age that we live in, there's lots of different
resources that didn't exist 10, 20 years ago.
And so for getting feedback initially, I actually leaned on the Indie Hacker community quite
a bit.
At that point, I think it was a bit smaller than it is today.
But folks were super, super helpful in giving me feedback on the website and the product
and why it would even matter.
And so that's where I got initial feedback when it came to other parts of the business
in terms of actually trying to get it out there in front of customers.
I used beta list and product hunt and all these other sites where you quote unquote
launch a product, essentially just put it out there in front of a big mass of people
and just see how people responded.
And from those first couple of months, we actually had about 400 users sign up.
So then the next step was, okay, let's try and make some money.
Yeah.
So one of the cool things about you having done this all on Indie Hackers is you actually
have a product page on Indie Hackers.
And I'm scrolling down your timeline, you've got hundreds of posts on here.
And I can see April 19th, 2017, you set up your landing page, June, you went full time
on cloud campaign.
In September, you basically first started charging.
It was the first time you actually let people pay for cloud campaign.
How much time after that did it take for you to actually get someone to agree to pay?
I think we might have gotten one customer in that first month.
But in terms of an actual number with some significance, it was a very, very long time.
And I think that goes back to what we were talking about earlier, which is I just was
targeting the wrong people.
I was really just trying to get anyone to pay for it.
It wasn't niched down enough to one particular target customer.
I think a good way to think about it.
At this point, back in the day, I was thinking about it like, well, I want to make sure it
appeals to everyone so then everyone can use it.
I think that's the wrong way to think about it.
I think the way I think about it now is if you go and tell someone, hey, Corlin, I'm
building this social media marketing tool for marketing agencies, what you want them
to say is, oh, I know a marketing agency.
Yeah, let me go refer you.
It needs to be specific enough that they think, oh, yeah, my buddy Jeff does that.
Let me connect you guys.
Otherwise, it's just, hey, we're building this tool for businesses.
Okay, yeah, I know tons of businesses, but why would I connect you?
It's just too generic.
Yeah, you have to make it easier for your customers to spread what you're doing by giving
them a very concrete value proposition for who this is for and what they're going to
get out of it.
But obviously, it's hard to figure that out upfront because you don't actually know.
You're innovating.
You're building something new.
That process, I think, is one that a lot of founders never get out of.
It's super easy to get stuck in that hunt for product market fit.
What should I be building?
Who's going to use it?
How much are they going to pay?
You can spend years just doing that and never figure out the answer.
I know you spent many months doing it, so when I look back at our early emails, I think
I didn't want to use Cloud Campaign because social media and marketing wasn't at the top
of my to-do list.
It was maybe 15th down the list.
All these other things that I really wanted to work on, and I didn't really have time
to even try it.
I think I signed up for Buffer and I not buffered any tweets whatsoever, so I was like, I can't
really try evaluating another tool.
How many people were you talking to back then to try to sell Cloud Campaign to, and what
was your technique for reaching out to them?
At that point, I was talking to just a handful of people.
It really wasn't enough.
Just people that had interacted with the product or with me at some point previously.
To be honest, it was all the wrong people now that I know.
I think I missed a step in the journey, which is doing customer discovery and figuring out
who the product is actually for and really defining that.
It was right around that time actually when I realized it, and it was a post that Patrick
McKenzie wrote, which was, find people that are used to paying for your product.
I think that's exactly what you said.
I tried selling the product to you and you're like, social media is not important to me.
I don't want to spend money on this right now.
I'm using Buffer.
It's free.
It's great.
I read this post from Patrick McKenzie and I was like, okay, let's go find people that
are used to paying for it.
That's when I started talking to the enterprises, realized that they outsourced to agencies
and realized, okay, this is the number one most important tool for an agency that does
social media management.
They run their entire business on this thing.
This is the right target market to go after.
At that point, that's when I started going a lot deeper into having these customer interviews
and just cold calling this list of there were about 12,000 agencies on this list and starting
alphabetically just going down the line and saying, hey, I'm building this new tool.
What's your biggest problem right now with marketing, with social media management?
There's also right around this time where I found a co-founder, which was great because
we talked about, I'm an engineer.
My skill set is not sales.
It's not getting on the phone talking to people.
It's something I just wasn't comfortable with at the time.
I may be called the first 10 agencies that we talked to.
My co-founder, Ross, called about 490 of them.
That's really where we started then figuring out what the right product is, started seeing
early sounds of product market fit and actually started generating some revenues when we started
having those conversations with our actual target customer.
There's a lot there to unpack.
The first question I have is, why didn't you quit?
It's so easy when you're talking to the wrong customers.
You're not giving you positive feedback.
You built this thing that you're hopeful for, but then you suddenly lose that optimism because
you're not getting any sales and no one's saying yes.
Why not completely pivot, build something different?
Yeah, I just felt so I knew my savings was running out one and I felt it really had sunk
cost fallacy.
I mean, I felt like I had dedicated so much time to building the product I had today.
I was like, I need to make this work.
And then another driving, a really big driving force for me is just fear of regret.
If I look back 10 years from now, am I going to regret that I didn't try hard enough or
I didn't push hard enough with this one product that I'm trying to sell?
And if I go back to a cushy engineering job, I'm always going to think, well, what if?
What if I stuck with it?
What if I tried this?
What if I did that?
And so I think that was really the driving force of like, I think this can work.
No one's really selling directly to these marketing agencies, although they're like
a very large part of the market, like, let's just push through this and like, let's see
what happens.
Second question I want to ask about your early days is about hiring a co-founder.
Because that's not a common thing that people do after they already get started by themselves.
They think, okay, I'm the founder, I'm a solo founder, if I hire anybody, it's going
to be an employee, but I'm definitely not going to bring on a late co-founder, which
I think is an oversight because it's kind of cool to bring on a late co-founder.
You're the one still in charge, you're sort of setting a direction, but you're bringing
on somebody who, ideally, you don't have to pay a full-time salary like you would a normal
employee, but also who is incentivized the same way that you are, who can sort of complement
your weaknesses, and who actually has full responsibility for making this business a
success and can wear a lot of hats.
How do you evaluate the right person for that kind of role though?
I mean, it's nerve-wracking to give up a huge chunk of your business to someone who you
haven't worked with.
It's so hard.
And I think there are ways of doing it that aren't as risky.
So there are actually two different friends I was talking to to become a co-founder.
The first one, it just ended up not working out.
And I think part of the reason was just like a difference in risk tolerance.
You know, he was a bit older, starting a family, has a mortgage he needs to pay for, and we
sort of had that conversation early on, and I think it's important to have that conversation
so you know, look, if we don't hit these benchmarks, it's just not going to work out.
And so the way we structured our contract was kind of reflective of that, right?
So I didn't want to just say, here, you get 30% of the company, hopefully it works out.
And then it doesn't work out, and you're kind of in the situation where you have a ton of
debt equity, and it makes everything else really hard.
And so the way we structured it is like, look, let's start off by giving you a little bit
of equity, because I want to compensate you for your time.
If we hit this benchmark, and it seems like we're making progress, and it's going to work
out, then you get more equity.
If we hit this benchmark, then you get even more equity, and it's kind of like earning
their way to become a co-founder.
And so that's the first situation.
That one ended up not working out.
The second one, it thankfully did work out.
And it was clear.
So initially, the way we structured the deal was he didn't get quite as much equity.
But after, I'd say the first month and a half, it was pretty clear that it was going to work
out, and we were a good fit together.
And so I was like, okay, here's the equity that you deserve to make us more even partners
and have more alignment.
Because that's a big thing, like, I think you mentioned like, why don't you just hire
someone versus bringing on a co-founder.
I think alignment is super important.
And you're both striving towards this vision of making a really valuable company.
Because you have some sweat in the game, some skin in the game to then actually see that
through and make that happen, rather than just trying to increase your salary or something
that is a bit more short term.
So now you're armed with a co-founder who's in the same sort of situation that you are.
His skills compliment yours, he's an expert, sales and talking to people, you could focus
on what you do best.
And that's coding.
And you have this huge list of marketing agencies, who you're just going down and calling.
How do you find a list like this?
Number one, what do you say once you get on a phone call with somebody who's a potential
customer?
Yes, I mean, fortunately for us, this list was just public and very easy to find.
I think it's because it's sort of like a directory, like white pages, right?
Like these agencies want to be found by potential customers.
And so they're actively putting their name out there with their phone number, their address,
their email.
And so it's easy to get that information, getting them to actually talk was a little
bit more difficult.
And this was something that was just through trial and error to figure out what worked.
But what eventually worked for us was doing an agency spotlight.
So we'd get on the phone with them and say, hey, we want to write an article about your
agency.
We think it's great, will you be built?
And we think a lot of other folks can learn from it.
Do you have 30 minutes to jump on the phone with us?
And we'll talk about what's the biggest problem that you're facing, which is what we ultimately
want to learn.
So that was a bit selfish.
But what's the biggest problem that you're facing?
And how did you get to where you are today?
How many brands do you work with, et cetera, et cetera?
And so that was pretty compelling for them because they're trying to get their name out
there the same as any other business.
And they're like, oh, sure, you have how many people visit your website?
And we're like, it's like 1,000.
It's not a big audience, but they're like, okay, it's fine.
It's 30 minutes of my time.
Worst case scenario, I get a couple customers from it, worst case scenario, there's another
link that's pointing back to my website for SEO.
And so we actually would write about one article a week doing these agency spotlights, just
kind of transcribing our call into a blog article.
That's super clever because usually if somebody reaches out to an agency, either they're a
customer or they're somebody trying to sell them something, very rarely is it somebody
who's like, yeah, let me help you get the word out.
Let me help you do what you're trying to do.
Even if you don't have a ton of traffic to your website, it's a pretty compelling offer.
Why would an agency say no to that?
It's just free marketing for them and then you get to learn and now you have a relationship
that you can potentially turn into a paying customer.
Did any of these agencies end up signing up for a cloud campaign after you did your spotlight
on them?
Nope.
So I think that's the downfall, right?
If you go into the initial conversation and you're saying, hey, we have this really cool
product that solves this problem for you, then they're like, okay, we'll evaluate it
as if we're buying the product.
Then we go into the conversation saying, hey, we want to learn from you and write this article
about you and it's going to be great.
Then they're like, okay, let's write the article and then as soon as you try and shift the
conversation to like, and this is what we're building and you want this, they're just like,
this isn't why I got on the phone with you.
And so eventually we realized that pretty quickly and so we didn't even try selling
most of the agencies.
It was more of like, okay, let's just use this for feedback to inform our marketing
and our product and then let's try and sell other agencies in a more scalable way, which
was advertising eventually.
So yeah, there's so many different channels you can potentially sell through.
Content marketing and cold outreach isn't working.
You maybe try going to conferences.
You maybe try ads as you just mentioned and at the same time you're testing all these
different channels, you're also tweaking your product to figure out what features resonate
with customers, what actually works and that's kind of what makes it challenging to find
product market fit is that you have these two moving targets at the same time that you're
trying to align, not just one.
What were some of the first successes you had after some of these failures?
Yeah, I mean, so I think just to kind of pull about one of the key points you mentioned
there is trying to get everything to align correctly.
And I think those initial conversations with those 500 agencies did that for us, right?
Like it informed our product in terms of you asking them what's your biggest pain point
and they tell you, okay, we can build that in our product now, but also inform sales
and marketing because you might mention something and they're like, oh yeah, that sounds awesome.
You're like, okay, we need to put that in our marketing efforts because that really
resonates with this particular audience.
Do you have any examples of something that you learned that actually changed how your
product worked?
Yeah, absolutely.
I mean, there's quite a few, but a really big one which is still feeling our growth
today is white labeling.
So most of these agencies want to have our product branded with their logo and their
subdomain and they want to be able to show it to their clients as if they built it because
they can charge significantly more if that's the case.
And so that was something that we got from very, very early feedback, built it in like
a couple hours and launched it and it's like still one of our biggest features that's driving
growth today.
Yeah, looking at your website, cloudcampaign.io, I see the sort of header text is, we help
marketing agencies scale, onboard more social media clients and charge a higher retainer
with a leaner team.
That's the kind of statement that you could tell has been crafted as a result of talking
to customers and figuring out exactly what will resonate.
How many dissect that?
Obviously we help marketing agencies scale as a result of you figuring out who your best
customer is.
What about onboarding more social media clients and charging a higher retainer and having
a leaner team?
Yeah, so we've tried to figure out what does our product do?
It does a lot, obviously, but you're not going to say, we do content approvals and we help
you create content and schedule content and report on it.
That's just very wordy and that's also what everyone else does.
So what makes us different and thinking about it more, we have a lot of automation built
into our platform.
We have a lot of streamlined workflows and why does that matter?
That makes the agency more efficient.
Why do they want to be more efficient?
They want to manage more clients.
So it's like taking it a few layers back and say, why does the business owner, who's ultimately
who we're selling to, why do they care and why do they want to sell out for our product?
It really comes down to they're trying to make more money and they're trying to increase
their bottom line and so we can make them more efficient, which translates to onboard
more clients with a leaner team.
At the same time, they want to make more money so we would tell them, you can charge a higher
retainer and that comes through the white labeled product that makes it look like their
own and community management and content approvals, all these different features that allow them
to charge more for their clients, to their clients.
And one of the interesting things about being a solo founder versus having a co-founder
and having employees is, as a solo founder, you pretty much have everything in your head.
You know exactly what conversations you've had with customers, you know exactly what's
going on in the code and your roadmap for developing certain things.
The second you add other people into the mix, you have to communicate, you have to figure
out, okay, well, what do you know?
What do I know?
How do we reconcile those two things to make sure we're going in the same direction?
It's especially a stark contrast if you're the developer founder, you're building the
product and your co-founders want talking to all the customers because you're trying
to figure out what you should build, but all that information is sort of in your co-founder's
head.
How do the two of you work together to figure out what to build and translate the things
that he was learning by talking to customers into the things that you were building?
Yeah, and I think it's even more difficult because we're remote, or I should say I'm
remote.
So I'm in San Francisco and then we have an office up in Portland, which is where the
sales team is at.
And so it's not as easy as just looking over across the table and asking them, hey, what
did you hear on phone calls today with sales?
And so we had to be pretty deliberate about setting up some structures in place that allowed
this open communication and that feedback loop.
And a big part of it is just staying in communication.
So hopping on the phone a couple times a day, being on Slack all the time, but we ended
up using just a public Trello board that any time a customer requests something, he's able
to then throw it into the Trello board or anyone that's on our sales team can just throw
it in the Trello board saying, hey, this customer requested this.
I can then go through once a week and say, oh, this is a good idea.
Let's move it to coming soon or considering or whatever else.
And then the other thing that's really cool about it is we put it out there for our customers
to actually interact with.
And so now we're at the point where customers weekly, if not sometimes daily, will then
add new feature requests directly to the board.
And that's extremely powerful because it makes them feel like they're contributing to the
product and they're part of the team.
They're helping you go from this fudging startup to a growing business and they can tell their
friends like, oh, I told them they need this feature and here it is.
And so that's been just huge for us in terms of getting ambassadors and customer buying.
Yeah, they're part of the story.
Some of my favorite products to use are ones where I know the founder, it's a super small
responsive team and I can make suggestions and see them actually happen.
And I have a lot of trust, I'm like, oh, this product will never be that bad because worst
case scenario, if I don't like something, I can email them.
And in your situation, you're in a pretty crowded market.
You're not the first company to offer tools to social media marketing agencies or help
people grow their social media campaigns.
And so I think being able to differentiate in any way that you can is super helpful.
I'm not super confident I can email a much more mature company and get them to change
a feature because they have their whole roadmap out already.
But you as a fledgling company could kind of use that as your advantage.
What are some of the other things you did to stand out among the competition?
Because I think it's both a blessing and a curse to be in an industry where there's
tons of competitors already selling something similar to what you're doing.
Yeah, so initialing down was obviously the biggest thing, right?
So going after marketing agencies specifically.
That was the largest one for sure.
Another way to stand out for us was just really focusing on the features that matter the most
to this particular audience.
So there are some competitors that have similar feature sets, but they're not actively advertising
them because they're mostly selling to businesses and then maybe some agencies will sign up
as well because they're like, oh yeah, I'm familiar with whatever it might be, Sprinkler
or Sprout Social.
And so we're directly advertising specifically to these agencies saying, hey, you can be
more efficient, you can white label your product, you can get more clients by using us.
And I think it just stands out and resonates with them.
And so all of our customers right now are inbound actually.
It's people requesting a demo saying, hey, I want to learn more about your tool and maybe
sign up for it.
And that's just been huge for us is getting all that inbound interest.
It's funny because this is exactly when your emails to me completely dried up.
Like, Portland is not a social media marketing agency.
I'm not talking anymore.
But I think it's so powerful to be able to say who is your customer and who's not your
customer.
Because if you know exactly who is your customer, you can do what you're saying and build features
that are specifically tailored to them.
And I have language on your landing page that's specifically tailored and appealing to them.
And yeah, maybe that means you're giving up some percentage of the market that you can't
sell to anymore.
But there's still a ton of agencies out there who have plenty of money who you can sell
to.
And now you're much better than the competition.
So I think niching down as often as it's talked about, it's probably still not talked about
often enough, as so many indie hackers start off by just targeting literally everybody.
You're my customer, everybody who could use it, but I think you did such a good job narrowing
it down.
Yeah.
And I think, yeah, I mean, this is the perfect example, right?
Like the space is so crowded.
I remember, this is actually a super funny story, but I had the idea for about a week
before I started, before I put up a landing page, and I was listening to the Indie Hacker
podcast back then, and I think it was episode number 10, I don't know, what are we on right
now?
132, this will be, I think.
This was a while ago.
It was episode number 10 with Laura Roter of Meet Egger, who some people might see as
a competitor, but we're actually selling to very different markets.
But anyway, she has a social media management tool as well.
And I was listening to the episode, and she starts talking about water bottles.
I think you asked her a similar question, you're like, is this a crowded space?
How do you think to go after it?
Why weren't you more hesitant?
She's like, look at your desk right now, how many different water bottles do you have?
There's so many different brands of water bottles, everyone has different preferences,
some appeal more to different groups.
And so there is room for everyone to still thrive within this market.
And it's funny, because that was kind of the moment where I was like, okay, let's do it.
If she said there's enough room for everyone all into that same market, we'll figure out
what our niche is and kind of carve our way through it.
It's so easy to have doubt as a sort of fledgling founder, when you just have an idea, but you're
like, other people are already doing this.
It's not that unique, it's not that revolutionary, should I really work on that?
And so I think her message really resonated with a lot of people who are like, oh, just
because other people are doing this doesn't mean I can't make it my own, make it unique,
find my own niche, and figure out a way to make it work.
Yeah, I mean, the other thing to note too is like, if you're bootstrapping a company,
you don't need that many customers, right?
How much money do you actually need to be generating if it's just you, or if it's you
and one or two other people?
You don't need that much of the market.
I think it's different if you're going VC-backed, and I think at that point, you might need
to find a bigger market that you can move into by either being vertically integrated
and going after that, or maybe finding a hole in that new market that hasn't really been
explored yet.
But if you're just trying to generate $10,000 a month for yourself and have a nice little
business, there's no issue with going after a crowded space.
And I think if nothing else, it actually is proof that there is a market that's willing
to pay for it, and there's customers, trying to educate a new market is super expensive
and it's really hard to do.
So why not just go after a group of customers that are already familiar with paying for
it?
Yeah, that makes perfect sense.
And there's a laundry list of other advantages to choosing a niche.
That's kind of a moat, for one, these bigger companies who your competitors can't really
afford to focus on super tiny niches because it doesn't make any sense to them.
They're trying to make a billion dollars, they don't want to go after a million-dollar
market, and so you don't really have that much competition.
There's probably more than enough money in that market for you, and so you don't really
need to go bigger, but you can also go bigger gradually.
So if you start at a tiny niche, and you work your way up, and customers love you, and you
suddenly dominate social media marketing as a customer set, well, now you've got a bunch
of testimonials, and a bunch of revenue, and employees, and a lot of power and brand and
name recognition.
And if you want to expand into a bigger niche or a different customer segment, it's much
easier to do that now with all these advantages than just trying to do that right off the
bat.
So I think one of the issues people have is they say, well, I want to sell to everybody,
and maybe you can eventually, but that's not where you should start.
Yeah, no, I think that is a huge mistake that a lot of folks make is they look at these
large companies that they admire today, like, oh, look, they sell to 10 different verticals.
I must do the same thing.
But if you actually dig back and go back to their origin story, a lot of them started
by just focusing on one small niche, and then really owning that space and then expanding
the product to other verticals, or going really deep with that niche and doing a land and
expand model, which is what we're doing.
So we're trying to gain trust and build up this large customer base of marketing agencies
and freelancers with our existing product, our beachhead market.
But the goal is to then expand to these other offerings.
Obviously, social media marketing is not the only problem that these freelancers and marketing
agencies have.
And so we want to be kind of the one-stop shop where they can come in, they can build
their clients, they can prospect new clients, they can do everything from here.
It's almost like a good example would be Shopify, how they democratize e-commerce.
As long as you have a credit card, you can start an online store.
As long as you have a credit card, you can be a freelancer and start up your digital
marketing agency.
Very cool.
So at this point in your story, your sales machine is rolling.
You've gone from spending many months trying to figure out product market fit to the point
where now suddenly you have customers and there's rays of hope and you've got a co-founder
working with you.
How did it feel to make that transition?
What kind of changes in your mind as a founder when you're trying to figure out what to build
versus when you know what to build and now it's just time to execute?
It's exciting at times.
I think at other times it's also, I'm not going to say painful.
It's a bit of a stretch but I think one of the reasons why as an engineer you start a
company is because you like to build something that is really innovative and fun and cool
and whatever else, something that really excites you.
A lot of times you're writing boilerplate code and you're just building what the customer
wants and what the customer wants is what they saw from a competitor and they're like,
oh, competitor X has this.
We're used to using this.
We need this within your tool.
And so that stuff isn't as fun but I think I just keep thinking back to, well, this customer
is paying for me to work on this product so that's actually really cool.
The fact that I get to work on my own product and we're making enough revenue that our customers
are actually paying our salaries which is pretty cool.
Yeah, what about the financial perspective of going from your bank account dwindling
every month to suddenly you're actually able to save money and spend money hiring.
How did that transition feel?
It felt great, honestly.
I mean, I'm still at a point where I was making a good bit more money at my engineering job
than I am now.
But it's really cool to be able to create these job opportunities for other people.
So right now it's just three of us full-time and we have three interns.
We're in the process of hiring a fourth full-time employee right now and so it's really exciting
like giving these folks the opportunity to join an early stage startup and pay them better
than myself but that's fine, you know, like it's just, I don't know, it's really cool.
It's like cool being able to create new jobs for people and like see them have the same
passion that we do and seeing our culture develop in that way too.
How do you hire somebody good at an early stage startup?
Because when you're hiring early employees, you kind of want them to wear a lot of hats.
They've got a lot of responsibilities.
Your company is not this finely oiled machine where everything's sort of in its place.
People have to figure out how to put things together and work with you.
How do you hire someone who's actually well suited to that kind of role?
It's difficult.
We've only made bad hires in the past and we've tried to fire quickly.
Most recently we hired an accounting executive named Andrew and he's just absolutely killer.
He's doing a great job and I think what we've noticed from his interview process versus
others is he came from a startup so he had been at an early stage startup that got acquired
and grew and so he kind of understand the role of wearing different hats and having
that responsibility.
I also think there's just different skill sets that are well suited for startups so
someone that's a self-starter.
There's not going to be a lot of hand-holding.
You need them to be motivated to get in there every day and do their work and work autonomously.
Someone that's organized and can stay on top of the tasks without you constantly hounding
them for it.
There's obviously a lot of soft skills as well and I think it's hard.
I also think I'm not the right person to give advice on this because we've only hired one
person well.
Maybe talk to me in a couple years and I might have some better advice.
What are some things you would say not to do?
If you've made some mistakes, I'm sure you've got some theories in your head for why those
mistakes were made.
Yeah.
I mean, I follow your gut so it's so hard.
You might interview someone and your gut's telling you this probably isn't the right
fit and you're just like, yeah, but I think they'll figure it out.
We can train that out of them.
We'll make it work and that's just not right.
Little optimist on your shoulder.
A little bit, yeah.
Hiring friends is hard too.
You just always need to be comfortable firing someone if you hire them and so unless you
feel really, really confident about them and how they'll fit in their role, I would typically
recommend not hiring friends.
One of the challenges, and I brought this up briefly earlier, is that you're trying
to grow and sometimes the things that work for growth stop working and sometimes you
need to discover a completely new channel.
Earlier on, you tried all sorts of different things and you mentioned that ads really worked
for you.
You released your ad spend tremendously since you first started so it seems like it's continuing
to work.
How did you hit on ads as a channel for growth and what are some of the things you did in
the early days?
We tried all sorts of things.
Initially we didn't have much money so it was whatever was cheapest to get our name
out there.
That was like posting on forums and attending free events that we think our customers would
be at.
Eventually, we started, as you mentioned, running some ads so being in Google SEM and
then various social media ads, we started sponsoring trade shows and we just tried a
slew of different things with as little money as possible, which is hard because you can't
really get significant statistical results unless you spend a good amount of money but
you obviously have a tight budget and so you're just trying to see not necessarily is this
the wrong channel but can I get some sort of result from a little bit of money.
Those are some of the things that we tried and even with the social media ads, which
is where all of our customers are coming from today is from social media, but even with
some of the early ads, we didn't have any success.
We throw it out there and it would fail for whatever reason but I think what's important
is just learning why it potentially didn't work.
Either the messaging is wrong, the audience is wrong or you're sending them to the wrong
spot.
It's the wrong objective and so that's what we eventually realized is like a kind of mixture
of those once we got the right objective and the right copy, which again, the copy we learned
from talking to all these potential customers over all those phone calls and the audience
we already knew from day one or not day one, but once we started running ads, but once
we got those all three kind of lined up, then we started seeing just significant results
and it's continued to deliver tremendously for us even up till today.
One of the difficult things I think about this search for how do you grow your company
is that you kind of have two choices.
You can go broad or you can go deep.
So I've been practicing chess a lot recently and trying to learn and my chess coach, I
complain to him about this all the time.
He's like, oh, look at the different moves and it's like, well, there's like 30 different
moves that I can make, but then for each one of those, I can go 10 moves deep and try to
analyze what's going on and it's really hard to figure out should I go deep on this move
if I haven't even tried looking at another one and it's kind of analogous to figuring
out growth channels, right?
There's 10, 15 different channels you can try, but then if you try one, it's not guaranteed
to work.
Ads didn't work for you upfront.
So it's like, okay, well, do we keep investing in ads and try to figure out why it's not
working?
Or we just try something else and hope it works first or second try.
How'd you decide to go deep on ads rather than just giving up and trying some other
thing?
Yeah, I mean, I think when we first tried ads, it didn't work, so then we kept trying
other things, but we never really checked anything off the list, right?
It wasn't like this doesn't work.
It's like this didn't work this time.
We'll try it again later.
It's kind of a breadth-first search, so cycle through all the possible options and then
kind of go back to the start and it's like, all right, well, nothing worked.
We know one of these should work, so let's try again.
The nice thing with social media ads, there's so many different variations you can try.
And so I think initially we had the most success with Google AdWords and with Facebook and
Instagram ads.
It wasn't successful, but we had the most relative success there compared to other things
that we tried.
And so the thought was like, yeah, we know other people in the same space have had success
here.
We know our customers are on this channel.
Let's just try running a few different tests and let's go a bit deeper on it.
I think, yeah, the main reason why we chose social media is because we knew our customers
were there and we saw a little bit of success from early on.
So it's like, in theory, this should work, so we just need to figure out how to make
it work.
Yeah, exactly.
How much money are you guys spending on ads nowadays?
So we just ramped up our ad spend to $10,000 a month, which I know sounds like a lot, but
our ROI is great.
So our LTV right now, our lifetime value is about $4,400.
And we acquire a customer for $450, fully burdened.
So counting the sales salary and everything.
So basically, you've built a machine where you can pour as much money as you want into
ads and you're pretty confident that you're going to get a profitable customer at the
end of it.
So for the time being, I'm sure it's going to change and we've seen some shifts within
our ad results.
Like our cost per lead is starting to go up and fortunately, we have an account manager
or Facebook that we work with.
And so, like, hey, this isn't good.
It's rising pretty rapidly and it's not sustainable for us.
What can we try?
And they have a very clear answer, they're like, oh, your ad is stale.
You need to refresh your ad and put a new creative Facebook's charging your extra because
it's so old.
Changed that, went back straight to normal, how it is today.
But yeah, I'm sure there's a ceiling to it.
We'll just see how far we can go with this one ad channel.
If somebody's listening to this and they're thinking about getting started with Facebook
ads, what would your advice to them be based on what you've learned going from spending
$0 a month on ads to $10,000 a month on ads?
Run a bunch of different tests.
I mean, if you're using Facebook, Facebook is pretty good about self-optimizing.
So if you give it a bunch of different options, so you can have one ad set that has, say,
10 different creatives and 10 different placement spots, Facebook will then figure out where
it's getting the best results from and start to optimize that itself, which makes it really
nice.
I would say the other thing is just kind of go through the process yourself as if you
were that person that's scrolling through social media and you see the ad, what does
that process look like?
Are you clicking on the ad and is that taking you to the website?
And then what's ultimately the goal?
It's really hard to just drive someone straight to sign up and have them put in their credit
card from a Facebook ad.
But for us, what works really well is getting someone to request a demo.
It fills in that whole education piece of why do they actually need this product?
What is the product?
All they have to do is go on Facebook, say, yeah, this looks interesting.
Maybe I want to learn more about it.
They put in their info and then we can actually get the opportunity to go on the phone with
them and sell them.
Let's step back for a second and look at this overall picture of you running this business.
Would you say that you're having fun?
Is this what you expected it would be and do you enjoy being a founder?
Yeah, I would say now I am.
I wouldn't say that was always the case.
When wasn't it the case and why not?
Oh, man.
I would say the first six months were fun.
It was really liberating just being able to work 24 hours on a startup, right?
You don't sleep.
You just keep working.
And that was super fun.
It's something I just always wanted to do.
I think around that six month mark was really tough just because it's like, okay, something's
not working.
We don't have any customers.
We're not generating revenue.
I'm having fun building it, but that's not going to pay my bills.
I think that's when it started kind of dawning on me.
It's like, all right, well, maybe this isn't as fun as I was expecting it would be.
I'd say that probably continued through until two to three months ago.
Yeah, I think there's obviously a lot of fun in doing the task that you like doing, coding
and the liberation of not having to work for the man, being able to set your own schedule,
work on your passion.
But there's also a lot of fun in making money, having a business that actually works.
Is that what sort of kick started the more recent spurt of enjoying what you're doing?
That and also seeing the bigger vision.
It's something I struggled with a bit.
I think we kind of flopped around and it's like, do we want to build a big business?
Do you want to stay bootstrapped?
What do we want to be when we grow up, essentially, in terms of the business?
I think we have a lot more clarity on it now.
We've put a lot of thought into it and have been much more deliberate in terms of planning.
I think that's just been super exciting.
I think it's gotten to a really, really fun spot.
What is the vision that you guys ended up with?
Building the multi-point solution that we kind of talked about, being the all-in-one
platform for marketing agencies and freelancers that are either just trying to get started
or they're trying to grow their book of business.
How do you end up with a vision like that?
Because there's so many different things you can do.
There's so many options and roads you can travel down.
What kind of factors go into deciding what you want to be when you grow up?
One part is the market.
We talked about the market is just extremely crowded.
If we tried to do what everyone else is doing, which is expanding from marketing agencies
to then selling direct to brands and selling to enterprises, I just think it's too crowded
and there's not enough space for us, but I think the other part of it is just listening
really closely to our customers.
A lot of them are saying, hey, you guys are killing on social media.
I love your tool, but any chance you guys could help us with billing or help us with
email marketing or whatever else.
I think there's a pretty large opportunity there.
It's a fun, honestly, it's a fun customer segment to serve because it's small business
owners.
They're trying to earn back their day.
It's really relatable.
I think going deep in that and just better serving them is pretty exciting.
I was reading a little bit of Jason Lemkin, the founder of Saster, which is a conference
and also a community and publication for people running SaaS businesses.
He had a good post about what's the hardest thing of running a SaaS business.
It actually wasn't just one thing.
It kind of changed depending on the phase that you're in.
Up until the point where you're making about $10,000 a month in revenue, he said the hardest
thing is just how little money you make from each customer.
You spend so much effort into a sale, you're calling people, you're on the phone, you're
on email, you're adding features, and then they end up paying you something like $10
or $15 a month.
Is it really worth it?
Would you agree with him that that was the hardest part of growing your business in the
first $10K a month?
Absolutely.
It makes your time just feel worthless.
You spend so much time working on this new feature that this customer is giving you probably
shouldn't do this unless it's a feature that everyone wants, but maybe in the early days
the customer's like, look, I would sign up if you had feature XYZ or whatever.
You're like, oh man, I could build it.
I'm an engineer.
I'll build it tonight.
Yeah.
You just spend hours building this new feature to get whatever, $100 a month.
You're like, this is not worth my time.
Why did I leave my job?
I was making so much more money and I didn't have to work 24 hours a day.
Yeah.
When I started Indie Hackers, which was never a SaaS business, I didn't really have that
problem because I was selling ads.
People would just pay me $5,000 for an hour-long phone call for ads, and so it felt very much
worth my time.
But on the flip side, before I started selling ads, I was constantly comparing to my hourly
contracting rate as a developer.
I'm making this many hundreds of dollars an hour as a developer, whereas this week I just
worked 80 hours on Indie Hackers and I got paid zero.
So it's really hard early on to not do that mental calculus and wonder if you're not dumb
for giving up your job and starting a company.
I think that's why it's important to do something that you enjoy.
People always say this is get into a business that you're going to enjoy because those early
days are tough.
You're definitely not making much money and you're having long nights and customers are
complaining about things and you're stressed out the whole time and you're just like, why
am I doing this?
Yeah.
Yeah.
Is there anything you can actively do after you've already started your business and you
actually have paying customers in a trajectory to modify your business and make it something
that you enjoy more?
Yeah, I think there's a lot of things you can do.
I try to be better about planning my day at this point.
So I really try and focus on parts of the business that I like doing and then not necessarily
neglecting the parts that I don't like, but maybe delegating those out to other folks
or hiring for them.
And so I think you can really build a business even no matter how far along you are, you
can start shifting the business to be more enjoyable and really just spend your time
doing what you want.
I think it's important to be deliberate and just make a list.
So what I did is I made a list and said, you know, these are the things that make me happy
at the end of the day.
Like if I build something, I'm really happy.
If I get recognition for something, I'm really happy, whatever it might be.
And so make that list and then figure out how you can structure your day around that
list to make sure you're at least doing one thing per day that makes you happy and makes
you enjoy building the business.
I love that approach because it's so deliberate and it's very easy to fall into like a habit
or a cycle or a pattern where you're just carried forward by momentum and you're just
doing whatever you did yesterday.
But if you're a little bit more deliberate about what you want, what makes you happy,
then you can actively rearrange your day and your tasks and make sure you do those things.
I should probably have a list like that for any hackers because there's definitely lots
of stuff I don't like doing, lots of things I do like doing and it's pretty liberating
to realize that you're the boss.
You could therefore decide what your day is going to look like and no one else can really
tell you what to do.
Yeah, it doesn't always feel like it early on.
I think that's the hard part is like when you're not generating enough revenue to really
hire other people, you are wearing every hat and you really have to do every single thing
you can to please your customers and get more customers.
But I think as the business starts growing, you can hire more people, it's just a bit
more liberating.
So what do you think the future looks like?
You sort of laid out your vision for cloud campaign, but you're also going to be raising
money.
That's a really big decision to make that might change the entire nature of how your
business grows, what's expected of you and the direction you're going in.
What do you kind of hope things end up for you and not just as a business, but also personally
as a founder?
Yeah, it's a very big question, Kortlyn.
You're making it hard on me.
I think a big thing is just building a culture and an office that I really enjoy working
in.
So putting good people around us, people that believe in the mission, people that are excited
to go to work every day and work on the problem that we're doing.
Yeah, ideally in terms of where the business is at, we're solving this problem for this
rapidly expanding industry.
So there's about 9.12 million freelancers that currently offer marketing or creative
services, which is massive.
That's crazy.
And I think it's somewhat of an overlooked industry and the gig economy is just growing.
And so I think if we can be that solution, that one-stop shop that just makes it that
much easier for them, I think that'd be really compelling.
And it's almost in some ways similar to Stripe's mentality, right?
Like Stripe is trying to make it easier to start a business no matter where you are in
the world.
And I think it'd be really cool if eventually one day we could be something similar, but
very specific to freelancers that are trying to start up a marketing agency.
Listen, Ryan, it's been cool watching your journey and to watch also your ambition expand
from I want to be an indie hacker to I want to be one of the leading platforms for marketing
agencies.
There's a ton of people listening in who are basically where you were two, two and a half
years ago.
What's your advice for somebody who's just considering becoming a founder or someone
who's just started?
So it's Tim Ferriss advice and it suited me well so far, which is just in time, not just
in case, right?
So don't like go learn some new framework or go set up Docker to like auto deploy some
servers if you have two users, like there's no point, like you're very, very limited in
your time when you're starting a company, especially if you're bootstrapped and don't
really have anyone else to help you.
So my advice is just focus on things kind of as they come up.
Like if you have to stay up till two in the morning the night before to get something
finished for meeting the next day, do it like that's, I think the best way to do it.
Otherwise you're just wasting so much time on effort that will never get used.
I love that advice because it also means that you need to learn on the job and you don't
really want to spend, you know, a ton of months or years reading in advance, how to start
a startup or how to get, you know, business off the ground, you really need to try it
out and you're going to learn more by doing than you will buy by reading your retain so
much of it more too, like if you're actually in the moment and like you're reading a book,
right?
And they reference something you're like, oh yeah, like I went through that last month.
Like now you actually remember it and you'll know like how to fix it or how it pertains
to you.
You actually have real experience to sort of hang this knowledge on rather than just hoping
it sticks in your memory for no real reason.
Ryan, thank you so much for coming on the Andy Hackers podcast, it's been my pleasure
having you.
Can you let listeners know where they can go to learn more about what you're up to with
cloud campaign and what's going on in your personal life as well if you share that sort
of thing online?
Of course.
Thanks for having me.
And yeah, I mean, so I blog on medium if you want to keep up with me personally.
I'm also on Twitter at underscore Ryan Bourne.
And then if you want to get in touch, you can email me directly at our Bourne at cloud
campaign.io.
And then you can, yeah, you can visit our website, which is cloud campaign.io to see
what we're up to.
If you want to sign up for trial, we're also hiring to you'll, you'll see the link on the
website.
All right.
Thanks so much, Ryan.
Thanks for having me.
Cheers if you enjoyed hearing from Ryan, I would love it if you reached out to him and
let him know.
He is at underscore Ryan Bourne on Twitter.
So if you learned anything or appreciated hearing a story, take a second and say thanks.
I'm also now releasing a weekly newsletter for the podcast.
So if you go to ndhackers.com slash podcast, you can subscribe and get my thoughts and
notes on each episode as it comes out.
Once again, that's ndhackers.com slash podcast.
Thanks and I will see you next time.