What's up, everybody? This is Cortland from AndyHackers.com. And you're listening to the
Andy Hackers podcast. On this show, I talked 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 at their companies and in 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 Baird Hall, the founder of a company called Wave.
Baird, welcome to the show.
Hey, Cortland. Thanks for having me. I'm a long-time listener,
so this is fun to be on the other side of it.
Yeah, it's fun to have you. I think one of my favorite things about the podcast nowadays
is that Andy Hackers has been around for long enough that I can bring on guests like you
who were on the form making posts and comments about getting started with your business and
apparently even listening to the podcast. And now you get to be on the podcast. And we could talk
about how far you've come and how successful you've been. You started Wave, I think way back in
December 2016. How much revenue is Wave doing today?
We just passed the 76k MRR mark recently and still having pretty good growth. But yeah,
we started it and we really launched in January 2017. And I think that's about when I started
showing up on the Andy Hackers forums.
Yeah, that was about seven months after I started Andy Hackers. And since then,
you've also somehow found the time to start another business called Zubtitle.
How much revenue is that one doing?
I think we're $34,000 a month. Yeah, it seemed like a great idea at the time to start another
Bootstrap SaaS business. And now it's great, but that first year of that one
was pretty tough. But we'll get into that later.
Yeah, but it sounds like it's going well. I mean, $76k, $34k, that's $100,000 a month
in revenue that you've basically added, starting at zero three years ago.
And of course, that's not all going into your pocket. You have expenses, you have co-founders.
But I have to imagine that your life has changed quite a bit.
It's not a ton different. I think the biggest difference is the pressures off a little bit.
That first year or two when you're getting started, and that point I was in the hole too,
from a failed startup that we can talk about. But now the bills are getting paid,
there's definitely less pressure. But aside from that, not much has changed.
I started, I think my original goal was to create a business that would let me work part-time and
make full-time money so my wife and I could travel. We really love to do that.
But then we wound up having a baby, I got a four-month-old at home.
So it's funny that I've traded that freedom in for Daddy Daycare a couple days a week.
So were you a founder before Wave and before this failed business?
Or was this your first foray into starting companies?
No, this was the first. 2016, that first failed startup that we tried,
was my first go at it. Before that, in 2010, out of college, I worked for a big software
company here in Charleston, South Carolina, where I live. A big publicly traded company.
And I was like entry-level call center, tier one support basically.
So I did that for a year and a half. Then I moved to a startup in town and I was a sales
engineer for four years. And that was a great experience. I think it was the ninth employee
and I was there for a little over four years. And they hit 50 employees about the time that
I left and decided to work on my own thing. So I was lucky to be able to build sales and
support skills before jumping into taking a shot at it.
That's quite a journey from call center employee to sales to $100,000 a month in revenue as a tech
founder. How did you make that transition from being an employee to being a founder?
At the time, I didn't know why I wanted to do it. I just had this gut feeling that I wanted to,
at some point, try my own thing. And my wife and I had just got married in 2015 in January,
January 2nd, 2015. And then mid February, I told her I wanted to leave my job and start a company.
And this was the first time she had heard anything of that. So she gets a lot of thanks for sticking
with me, especially through that first year too. She likes to joke that she's going to put angel
investor on her LinkedIn profile one day because she really helped me get through that first year
and a half. But so anyway, I didn't know exactly why I wanted to do it. But looking back, I know
that throughout my whole life, I've always been searching for some type of creative outlet,
never been good at, you know, arts or music or anything like that. And I was always looking for
a way to create things. And it turns out that you know, building companies is my outlet for that.
And I don't think I'd really want to do anything else now.
Most people who aren't software engineers, when they think about building companies,
they're like, I'm going to open a grocery store or a restaurant or something in the physical world.
What convinced you that tech companies were the way to go, especially considering that you
couldn't code yourself?
Yeah, I've been working in tech for five years. So that's kind of where my headspace was. And I had
just been with the startup as they grew pretty fast over those four years, I got to see kind of
a lot of the checkpoints that they hit very different. It was a kind of a B2B enterprise
business for nonprofits, I guess my head was just in tech, and I've always really enjoyed it.
And the original idea was I wanted to build an app that let I was a big I'm a big sports
radio fan. Well, now sports podcasts, of course, but back then I was listening to a lot of sports
radio, I was driving around in my sales job. And I was so frustrated that I couldn't use my phone
to talk to other listeners of the show debate sports with them. So the original idea was to
create an app that allowed callers or listeners of radio shows to actually kind of virtually call in
with their one or two minute take, and talk to other listeners. And I convinced my co founder,
Nick, who's still my partner today to, to help build it. And it was just a rough go from a
business standpoint, great idea, we got a lot of listener or got a lot of users. And it was a lot
of fun. And we learned a lot by making all the mistakes. But that was kind of the original
starting point for me.
You're making all the mistakes. Tell us about a few of them.
The biggest one was just we thought a feature was cool. So we would build it. And we always
thought that next feature was going to be the thing that's got us on the right track. And we
would, you know, say, Oh, man, if we could build this integration, or if we could just, you know,
get social media integrated, so it's easier for people to sign up like, well, that'll set us on
the right path. I don't know if we've coined the term, I don't think we have. But it's basically
like the feature fallacy that we kept chasing that I feel Nick, my co founder, man, he really
put the work in to make that product the best he could. But the problem wasn't the product,
it was just there was no business behind it. So we could never raise money. And we tried so many
different types of business models, sponsorships, subscriptions, ads, everything. And we just never
could really model it out on paper, but we could never actually get any positive traction for any
of the revenue model. We worked on that product from 2015 towards the end of 2016 and spent my
savings on I probably put 30 grand in my save all my most of my savings into it. And Nick put all
that time into it. And we wound up selling it for parts. And yeah, definitely was in the hole from
all that. But it was a good experience of what not to do. And I was just stressed out all the time.
There's just so much weight on my shoulders, because it was so such upswing for the fences,
felt like we were kind of either hit a home run or strike out. And we learned during that time
that we don't ever want to run a venture back business where, you know, waiting on somebody to
invest in your company, the next milestone or next checkpoint that you have to hit,
just really stressful. A lot of people start things and fail. I've been there about half a
dozen times. What do you think was the hardest part of that stress and going through that failure
and seeing your idea not work out the way that you planned? You know, there were a lot of things,
signs indicating that it was working. We had a lot of users that loved using it. And we had a lot of
big ESPN and Fox Sports radio shows using the product. But we just could never get anyone to
pay for it. So on one hand, it was definitely a success just to build something and have somebody
use it. I mean, how many people don't even make it that far. So we tried to be positive about it,
but it was more tough running out of cash and looking back at all that time and effort that
we put into it. It really just stung towards the tail end of that the most. And the lesson learned
is we should have realized a lot earlier that there wasn't a business to be had. And we should
have just kept it on the side as a fun side project. Yeah, there's always got to be some
story you tell yourself looking back as to why this was worth it. Why did you invest all that
time? What did you get out of it? With some of the things I've started in the past that have not
worked out, I can at least look back and say, well, I learned a ton. I learned a lot about
how to code. I become a better front end and back end developer, a better designer,
better at sales. What do you think you took out of this failed experiment?
I think the biggest lesson we learned was we need to stop coming up with our own ideas and listen
to the market and listen to what people want. That company was more B2C focused. We felt like
all the pressure lied on us to come up with the ideas and try to manufacture growth on our own.
We weren't doing a lot of listening, even from our users or from the partners that were using
the product. That was the big lesson. Once we made that shift of maybe our ideas aren't that great,
but we can start with an idea and then start listening to what people think about it and
follow down that road rather than feel like we're pushing something up a hill.
That was definitely the biggest lesson. Marketing to consumers is really tough. Definitely not for
us, but I learned a lot just as far as how to promote things on social media and how to get
in front of consumers, which we don't do a lot of now, but a lot of those principles I think still
carry over to marketing in any respect. At this point, you've got one failed startup under your
belt. You're officially an entrepreneur. A lot of people quit at this point in time. They're like,
well, I just blew through my savings. That wasn't pleasant. I worked so hard. I put all this time
into it. Maybe I learned some lessons, but I don't really want to go through that again. It was nice
and stable having a job. Why didn't you guys quit and just go get jobs? The answer was right in
front of our faces. Towards the end of that failed startup, we were working on a marketing tactic of
sharing audio content submitted by these users and putting it on social media. The thought was,
if we could actually share what these people are talking about on our platform, on Facebook,
Twitter, Instagram, other people will hear it. They'll click the link. They'll download the app
and come join in on the conversation. We learned that really quickly that you can't actually put
audio on social media. You can't upload an MP3 file to Facebook. You have to turn it into a
video file and then share it. Nick, my co-founder, really over a weekend, built this really quick
internal tool. He cobbled some existing tools together and built me a quick interface so that
I could create these MP4 videos and turn audio into MP4 videos. We were just using it internally
and sharing these videos on social media. As we were realizing that we needed to sell that
failing company, we started getting emails from podcasters and other people. They were saying,
hey, your app is not interesting, but how are you creating these little videos?
The light bulb just went off. We're like, oh man, we are working on the wrong thing.
This little tool that we built is actually more interesting to other people than the whole app
platform. I don't know what I would have done if we didn't have that realization those last few
months. I guess I might have went and got a job, but at the same time we were selling,
we sold the IP, the code base and all the functionality. We sold that and that took
about two, three months to actually get that sale completed. While that was happening,
we were spinning out that internal tool as its own product.
Did the sale help you finance working this other product? You'd blown through your savings at this
point. How do you find the time and the money to work on yet another startup and you've already
been going for so long and things haven't worked out?
We didn't sell the company. We sold all the IP for it for about $27,000. After two years of two
people working full-time on something, that was nothing. We did take that money and we started
the new LLC and funded it with, I think we both put a thousand bucks into the new LLC.
We both instantly said, okay, let's work on this new thing, but we both had to go get freelance
contracts. There's a group here in Charleston that a group of freelancers that we worked with
and just worked on a variety of projects half the time to pay our bills and spent the other half
working on Wave. I spent a lot of time freelancing in my 20s and I was making a considerable amount
of money as a developer doing this remote contract work. I always had these profitable
side projects that I was trying to get off the ground. I was trying to make them work,
but I never had the right level of motivation. I couldn't get enough momentum going to take them
that seriously because when I compared how little money those are making to how much my hourly rate
was as a freelancer, the math just didn't add up and I couldn't take it seriously until I just
eventually quit freelancing. How did you maintain the motivation to keep working on Wave when you
were freelancing? Yeah, we felt the same way. It was tough to revaluing your time. It was very
difficult at that point. What we did was our sites with Wave, we have absolutely never thought that
it would get anywhere to the size that it has as far as recurring revenue goes. Our initial goal
with Wave was we thought it would be really cool if we could get this business generating enough
income for both of us to pay our mortgage, which was about 1,800 bucks, $1,700. That was our goal
and we were just working to get it to that point. It just kept growing each month by a little bit
and we've always had very linear month over month growth. It started at 40%, dropped down to 30%,
and then stayed at 20% for a really long time. Every month, we were like, well, we can't stop
working on it because it keeps growing and that possibility is still there. When we first started,
something else that was really important is we created Nick has much more of a finance mind than
I do. He created a lot of different models. Even before we decided to get into it, we really
took our time much more seriously this go around. We said, look, if we're going to put time into this,
we need to understand what it potentially could be. We would model it out based on what we thought
the price could be, based on how many users we could get, and pretty simple financial models.
We created three different ones. We created the minimum viable model as in if we made
less than this, we're not even going to work on it anymore. But there's that like, hey,
let's pay our mortgages and here's the model of what that looks like. Then we created a better
case scenario and then the best case scenario, which we kept in mind too. We at least had an
idea like, okay, this thing is going to fall somewhere on this spectrum between these two
endpoints. Really, anywhere in that, we're going to be happy with the result and at least try it
and see what happens. That's so smart because so many founders get stuck in this weird no man's
land, this zone where my company's not doing that great, like maybe I should quit, but it's got
potential. I've got a few more things I could try and I can add. Maybe I should stick with it.
And it's really hard to make that decision. You can spend years of your life working on something
that has no chance of working just because you haven't set any sort of defined cutoff point.
You don't have any criteria for evaluating whether or not it's worth continuing to work on.
Or it sounds like the two of you made that decision up front and you knew maybe if it
goes this long without hitting this amount of revenue, we quit and move on to something else.
Yeah. And for us, quitting was never really a thought because we started making money really
quickly with Wave. From month to on, we were at least paying our AWS bill. So we knew right away
this thing has some type of legs. We didn't know exactly what. So it was less about quitting and
more about like, hey, is this a side gig or is this a full time project? And that's what we really,
our goal has always been to build our own company that can support us full time. We're not interested
in side gigs, but if the worst case scenario is this thing just kind of lives on its own and who
knows does whatever, then anything really in that mindset is a positive result. So I think that's
where our head was. We never really thought about quitting and we were like, well, if this doesn't
work, we'll just maybe it'll generate a couple hundred bucks a month and we'll try another one.
So it felt very much low pressure and just get to work on it and see what happens. Really revisit
every quarter just about and kind of do a health check on the business, see how it's doing and
make a decision on whether or not to push forward or how much time to spend on it.
So let's talk about these early days. When I think about starting a project or even just building a
feature, what's going through my mind is how important it is to focus on the problem that I'm
trying to solve. So what is the problem I'm solving? Who are the people who have this problem?
How frequently do they have this problem? How much do they care about it? How much time and
money and energy are they already investing in solving this problem? Because all this stuff
is going to completely dictate what your business looks like and how well it works.
But I think this way because I'm largely just very theoretical. I literally talk to founders
and interview founders for a living. And the reality on the ground is usually a little bit
more practical, a little bit messier. How were you wrapping your mind around the idea behind
WAVE in the early days? And what made you confident that it was going to succeed before
you started getting revenue in the door? Well, it was pretty clear early on because
there were podcasters that we saw on social media when we were doing research and looking around.
We saw podcasters already creating these videos, these style of videos that you've probably seen
them on social media, where it's a picture with an animated waveform and some texts and some
captions. And a lot of the more prominent podcasters would have a video coordinator of
some type, somebody actually creating these videos in Adobe After Effect. So we were seeing
podcasters were already doing this thing, but they were just doing it very, very manually.
And for every one podcaster that has the resources to do that, there's 100 more that want to get to
that point. So we knew that there was at least some appetite for it in the market. We didn't
exactly know how much. So just seeing those patterns, I think is really important as an
entrepreneur is making sure that you're actually looking out in the market and seeing something
happening. Because most of us bootstrappers are not creating some new category. Most of us are
improving an existing one or hooking into an existing market, something like that.
So that was really important for us to make sure that people are doing this and that there's other
people that want to do it as well. And early on for me, it was just a lot of direct email and
social media, direct messages. Back then, you could message just about anybody and we'd just
reach out to podcasters. And we also tried musicians, audiobook authors, journalists,
we tested some other markets because it seems obvious now, but back then, podcasting is not
what it was today. We knew it was growing, but we didn't know it was going to turn into this
booming industry. So we actually did some validation early on of like, okay, well,
what different types of audio creators could use this? And we would just use direct outreach to
reach out to 50 podcasters, 50 musicians, 50 journalists, and kind of see what happens.
And the podcasters just right away, the reaction we would get through our emails and social media
messages were far and beyond more positive than any other group that we tested.
I love that you said that you were looking out at the market, you're looking at what people were
doing, you're sending these emails. A lot of indie hackers are solo founders and they're
developers. I think it's easy for them to spend all their time just coding and building the product.
And maybe they have this vague sense like, hey, I should probably be doing other things too,
but I'm not really sure what those other things are, how to do them well. So I'm just going to
keep coding and hopefully everything will just work out. And usually if you're thinking like that,
things don't work out. But because you had a co founder, Nick could focus on the code and the
product and the financial modeling or whatever else he was doing. What kinds of things were you
doing in those early days? While he was coding the product? Were you just sending tons of emails to
customers? Yeah, lots and lots of outbound communication, just emails and social media
messages mainly. And I was also doing some blogging, getting the content marketing engine
going, but that takes time to generate results. And we knew we needed to get in front of people
as quickly as possible. It was tough doing that. I mean, we our product started, the original
package was $7 a month. So, you know, sitting there all day, send out 50 emails to podcasters
for, you know, hoping to get a $7 sales. Pretty brutal, but that was really the only way we could
have done it. We didn't have an audience. We didn't have any money. The only thing that we had was some
time. And so that left direct marketing, I guess we could have done social media, but that's not a
direct result either. So it was kind of the only option. And it was a great way to get in front of
podcasters and learn what resonates with them. What type of copy should we use? Direct sales is
a great way to test pricing as well, because you can email 10 different people 10 different prices
and see what comes back. So it was definitely really beneficial. That's really what I spent
most of my time doing and then support as well. We had Drift installed on our website initially.
And anytime somebody came to the website and had a question, I was just ready to answer as soon as
possible. Like that was somebody landing on our website and sending us a message was like gold to
me and spent a lot of time chatting with people. I actually looked at our intercom. We put an intercom
in early 2018. And I was looking at our stats the other day and we've had over 10,000 conversations
in the last 24 months. I think it averages out to be like 14 a day or something like that. Back then,
of course, we weren't getting that many. But we spent we just spent a lot of time just emailing
and messaging people and then chatting with them when they came to the website and kind of learning
on the fly. I talked to Rob Fitzpatrick a few weeks ago. He also has a background in sales.
And he wrote a book called The Mom Test. That's all about how to talk to your customers as a
founder, and really get the truth out of them. Are there any truths that you learn from having
all these customer conversations and interacting with people that you never would have guessed
without having those conversations? We learned a lot about podcasters.
I didn't know anything about other podcasts in my life, aside from being a guest like this,
as of late. But so early on, it was just learning so much about podcasters, what their goals are,
what their processes, how much time they have, all of them have some other business or other
thing going on. So really early on, it was just learning so much about podcasters and what they
do. Yeah, I'd done sales before. So I kind of knew that process. I knew why people buy things,
how to get people's attention. I've kind of approached that already. So it was really
more just learning about the market through those early days.
So I'm on any hackers right now. I'm looking at some of your old comments from three years ago,
2017. And you have one that's explicitly about cold emailing people. Because I was talking about
cold emailing. I did the same thing with indie hackers to find my first interviewees.
Unfortunately, I wasn't making any money from them. I was just doing free interviews.
But in your comment, you actually gave some tips for how to make cold emails work.
So you said that instead of scraping large lists for sending out email blasts,
you would instead spend your time researching prospects that fit into a specific persona
that you were targeting. And then you would personalize each email,
and you made sure to not come across as salesy. And you said that you sent 10 to 30 cold emails
a day until you had your first dozen or so customers, which took two weeks. I think a
lot of people try this cold email strategy and they don't have that kind of success.
What additional tips would you give to people who are struggling with this?
Yeah, the first step is researching. A good salesperson spends time researching who they're going
to reach out to. That's why we hate salespeople so much. And especially that's why we hate cold
email salespeople, because they just buy a list that you happen to be on and you get this
very boilerplate email that is very salesy because they pitch their company, they say something that
tries to be personable, and then they try to actually sell you all in one big email.
And that is not the way to do it. So if you're worried about doing direct sales,
because you don't want to feel slimy and sleazy, don't worry because you don't have to do it that
way. And it's not the right way to do it. So the first thing is even if you're selling a $7 product
like we did, take the time to do research and have a reason to reach out to somebody.
And they're going to appreciate it. Your life is going to be a lot easier if you take that extra
time and do it. And you're going to have a better response rate as well. The big piece of advice I
would give to people that are nervous about doing sales is you have to understand that,
yes, people hate being sold to. We all do. Even salespeople hate being sold to. But at the same
time, people love being attended to and cared for. And there's nothing better than somebody else
solving problems for you authentically. That's what we all want. We all want to interact with
people. And we love that idea of being helped. So if you can approach sales authentically like that,
it's much less intimidating because you're not coming in as that sleazy salesman that gets a
bad rap because that's the way most people. And really, it's more the bad rap comes from lazy
salespeople. They don't want to do the research. They want to send out 1,000 emails, get a couple
sales, and move on. So that's the other big advice I would get. And then the thing that kills me with
cold emails is the length of them. They really should be one or two sentences long. You really
shouldn't be sending a cold sales email. What you should be doing is sending an email to somebody.
And all you're trying to do is get permission to have a conversation. So if I was going to try and
sell you with wave, I'm not emailing you about our pricing tier and our features and how they
work. I'm just sending you an email that says, hey, Cortland, I love the podcast. I love what you're
doing for the indie hacker community. What are you doing to promote your podcast on social media?
Yeah. And keep it really short. And if you don't get a response, that means
Cortland doesn't care about social media. Fine. Well, then it's not going to be,
I can't help you. But if you do get a response, you're getting permission to start a conversation.
And that just seems a lot more friendly and easy rather than trying to sell somebody in one email.
I love that. And I would definitely respond to that email if you'd send it to me because
at that point, we're just talking about podcasting. And why wouldn't I want to do that?
Yeah. And something else that gives salespeople a bad rap is a lot of them are stressed to hit
their next number, right? So they're forcing it, they're pushing, they're pushing. If you approach
sales as like, I'm not forcing anything. And the great thing about being an entrepreneur is you're
usually selling something new that's novel. And if somebody needs it, they're going to tell you
pretty quickly. And if they don't need it, you've got a huge, massive market to move on to. There's
a lot of prospects out there. So you don't have to force it with people. You just, you know,
if they don't seem interested, then just move on to the next one, learn from each conversation.
So I know why people are intimidated by cold, just direct sales in general.
But hopefully those things can kind of help lessen the intimidation factor there.
I want to add one thing that I think is cool about your story that a lot of people struggle with,
which is that you kind of knew who your customer was. You were talking to people,
you honed in on the fact that podcasters really like this as opposed to other people doing audio.
And because you could really describe who they are, these are podcasters,
you know where to find them. And so many people start a company where they don't
have a clearly defined customer, they don't know who they're selling to.
And so they can't even do this because they have no idea who to email.
I think the old adage goes, if you're selling or marketing to everybody,
then you're not selling to anybody. You just, it doesn't work that way. You have to really know
who your customer is. And we actually niche down a lot farther than just that. Podcasting was a
pretty big space in itself. And we said, well, we're not just going to blast any podcaster,
let's actually start with podcasters that are using their podcasts to promote their business.
That way we're at least getting a little bit of a B2B element.
And when we started doing that, we found that consultants, business coaches,
people with a personal brand, bloggers and influencers that are using a podcast to sell
products through their website, those people really were incentivized to promote their podcasts
because it helped their whole process of their whole business.
So we found initially that that was our group to start with. And I would say that those people
made up the majority of our first 100 customers. Those first 10 are brutal to get. And then when
we found out that that niche really was receptive to new marketing strategies and would use a
product like ours, that made the next 50 customers or so a little bit easier.
What does your life look like in terms of the hours you were working at this point? Because
you're freelancing, you're sending all these emails, you're discovering all these insights
about customers. How did you find the time for all this stuff?
I was freelancing maybe three to four hours a day, I think, two to three hours. I think I made like
30 grand freelancing that first year. So it wasn't much. I wasn't working a ton. But my wife and I
were living in an apartment and she would leave for work. She worked for a tech company downtown.
And I just sit at the kitchen table and send out emails and take support calls all day. That's
pretty much it. Take a break to go work out and hang with my wife for a little bit. And then when
she goes to bed early, and I usually stay up late and night is kind of when we would think about
like, okay, what do we need to work on product wise that is kind of when Nick is in his creative
engineering mode. But those days were very, very monotonous. And it definitely felt like it's not
too much of a grind because you're just sitting there at your laptop all day. But mentally,
it was definitely tough to stay disciplined and constant with that.
Yeah, especially if you're selling a product that's like five, six, $7 a month,
not making that much money.
We're selling a $7 product and having to discount it every now and then.
Oh, man, how long did it take you to actually get to the point where you could start making
real money and eventually quit your job and stop freelancing?
It wasn't until the next year. So we started that in 2017. I freelanced all of 2017. And then
2018, I can't remember exactly what MRR number we were at, but it was still growing. And that's
kind of when it started clicking like, Oh, wait a second, we might be able to push this thing a
little bit farther and work on it more full time. And I took on a big freelancing contract,
the first quarter of 2018. And that was a really heavy contract. And that was tough because wave
is actually starting to take off a little bit. And then I was working pretty much full time.
But that was just for a quarter. And then at the end of that, I had saved up enough and wave was
starting to pay us a little bit. But so I guess it was probably 15 months after we launched wave
that I actually started focusing on it full time.
Is that 15 months of just nothing but sending cold emails? Or did you find a different strategy
that was a little bit less monotonous at some point?
No, I'd say the first six months was really, really heavy outbound. And then through that
process, we really started understanding who our customers were, what got their attention.
And then we moved to content marketing, we started blogging. For us, it took about eight
months for blogging to really start seeing some good results and start getting some
some traffic from SEO. We had been doing social media too. So it was definitely very much a
snowball effect. I've written a blog post every week. I mean, not every week, but that was the
goal pretty much consistently, one a week since we launched. So we got up enough content library
to where it all started coming inbound. And we stopped doing outbound probably after eight months.
If you could go back in time to yourself as a fledgling blogger who was just getting started,
what would you what would you tell him to help him sort of skip a few steps ahead and blog
effectively? That's a good question. I don't think I'm the best blogger out there. I just
keep it really simple. I just try to put myself in the shoes of my target customer and ask,
what are the things throughout the day that they're googling for? So for podcasters, it was,
you know, how do I grow my show? How do I promote my show on Facebook? There's a lot of how to
articles early on, those are kind of the easiest ways to get started. And then once we kind of
exhausted all those how to's across all the different social platforms and, and things like
that, we kind of gravitated towards more podcasts, I don't want to call thought leadership, but just
podcast podcasting strategies. So how to interview people how to, you know, make sure that you're
editing properly, what tools to use, things like that. But content marketing is kind of a black
hole where you can go as deep as you want with, you know, keyword strategies, and just, you know,
making sure your content is formed in all these perfect ways. But I would say just keep it simple,
write short articles, and just trying to think about how you can help educate your audience.
And it takes a lot of time to, you know, one article generally isn't going to make or break
your blogging success. So you just have to stay consistent. And I don't know if six months is a
typical, like, advice that people would give, but that's what it was for us. That's how long it took.
So at some point during this whole journey, you decided that one business wasn't enough,
you weren't just going to stick with waving that even though it was growing,
things were working out, you decided to start a second business called the subtitle.
Why did you start that? What's the story there? The subtitle is another example of a business
kind of spawning from another. So with Wave, we had always had customers asking us if a big feature
request was always how do I add subtitles or captions to my videos. And every time that we
evaluated that project from an engineering standpoint, and the ongoing cost of it, we
pushed it off and we kept punting on it because it was going to be a lot of work to integrate that
and just to get the UI working properly. And we kept punting it kept punting it. And it was
definitely our number one feature request. And that was painful to by the way, just saying no
to a feature because we didn't think the ROI was there, even though that's what people really
wanted. People were still signing up and using our product without that feature. It was just
something they wanted added on badly. So the idea was, well, if we create this video captioning tool
for our product, it could actually work with any video, not just audio turned into video that wave
creates. So why don't we create this as a separate product and just integrate it into wave. That way
we can sell to people that are recording actual video footage and then just integrate it with
wave and upsell customers there. So that was the original thought. And I was naive enough to think
like, Oh, this will be so easy. We're just going to launch it. You know, I'll do all the same
marketing. We'll do some direct outreach. We'll do some content marketing. We'll do the same pricing
strategy. And you know, this will be no problem. And we launched that in 2018. And we just paid
ourselves for the first time in January of 2020. So that took two years as well to make any money
personally from it. That one was almost just as long of a road. But that was why we did it. And
it turned out to be the right call because it's a totally separate market that subtitle serves.
And it integrates with wave and powers that for all the wave users.
Yeah, I was going to ask where you got the confidence to switch into this new business.
And did you feel like you were giving up on your old business, but you had that kind of naive
founder optimism where you're just so sure things are going to work and you have this rosy picture
of how it's all going to work. And I think sometimes you need that to propel yourself into
what ends up being a pretty slow and painful process. You have to be kind of unrealistic to
convince yourself to go through with it. Yeah, I was lucky at the time because I had been full time
with wave for six months or so. And wave, it was starting to run itself to some degree. It's still
obviously we work on it every day, but we've really built it to be as automated as possible. So
I had a little time opened up. I was used to freelancing anyway with that other half of my
day. So I was kind of ready to take on a new project. So there's this book called Traction
written by Justin Mayors. He's been a guest on this podcast before and Gabriel Weiberg.
Yeah, it's all about the different channels you can use to find customers and grow your business.
So there's sales and email and advertising, blogging, SEO, I think there's something like
19 channels in there. What would you say were the most successful channels for you
later on as wave continue to grow? Was it always just SEO? And I know you stopped doing the sort
of direct email outreach. What else worked? Well, I think the biggest benefit that we had
with wave was that users were creating content that they would then share on social media.
And what we found out early on with wave customers is a lot of them were buying originally just
because that first set of customers was buying just because they were already creating these
videos very manually, and they wanted a faster way to do it. But the more we talk to people and
the more we talk to people that weren't doing it podcasters before buying wave would tell us like,
I just want to look like Gary Vee, or I want to look like, you know, insert very, very popular
podcaster. And we learned that they really cared about the appearance of their podcast on social
media. Because, you know, it's definitely like they're looking at their peers a lot, and they
want to stand out and separate themselves from the crowd. Right. So one thing that we've always
done early on is really focused on sharp, good looking animations and making sure the elements
of the video are very pleasing to the eye. So that when they share it on social media,
they'll feel very proud about it's really tapping into that emotion of, you know, being proud of
what you're sharing. And that's why a lot of customers love wave. And we brought a third
partner on named Rob, who's a really sharp engineer. And he was actually our kind of the
specialist on the animation side. And he created all of these custom animations from scratch. And
people would see those on social media and ask the person that posted like, Hey, how'd you do that?
And they would share wave. And that was really when things started taking off is when we created
those really good looking animations and word of mouth marketing started to kick in. And that was
I mean, that's been the best advantage that we've had as far as our growth goes. Sure,
content marketing is great. And we launched an affiliate program, which is great. But it was
almost I guess, I don't know if that's a chapter in the traction book. But I guess we would call
that engineering as marketing has was probably the biggest advantage that we had.
Yeah, it's like product driven growth. I'm not sure it's in traction either. But it's,
it's great because it's free. Essentially, you're building your product, it exists forever. And now
you just get this free growth where you don't have to write blog posts, you don't have to
advertise just getting people recommending your product, or teaching others about just by using
it. And you know, listening to your story, it reminds me of why I get so frustrated at people
who launched something and it doesn't work in like a couple weeks and they quit. Because so much of
what led to your overall success over time are just these things that you learned on the job
from selling and seeing what worked and talking to people. Like you probably had no idea in the
very early days that one of the problems you were solving was just letting these fledgling
podcasters look more professional, look like their heroes look like Gary V. But once you realize that
you can start doing all sorts of specific stuff to help people get that feeling and solve that
problem. And you're never going to uncover that unless you stick with your business and keep
talking to people and keep trying things out.
Yeah, I couldn't imagine doing this and not being interested in other people. I think that's really
what's driven us is we're just curious. We want to know like what makes podcasters tick. We talk to
them, we chat with them and we ask them questions and we try to read between the lines and see what
they really want. And it took a long time. A lot of conversations on intercom to kind of really
distill down what people wanted because a lot of times people don't know what they want, but they'll
get pretty close to telling you. So I think the best advice is you've got to have a certain level
of empathy just to be able to put yourself in somebody's shoes when you're chatting with them
and say, oh, man, that sounds really tough. How would you improve that? How do you want it to be
and just chat with them? And I think that's been a big event. We've always put customer support
as a massive priority for us. We try to have very fast response times and we try to help people as
fast as possible. And it builds trust with them so that then they'll tell you these things and
you can get the real story after you've chatted with somebody a couple of times.
They'll tell you what their real dreams or passions are. So yeah, have an empathy and just
being willing to take the time to listen to people. Couldn't agree more. There's so much you learn
from listening to what people say. And it kind of seems like it's going to be unproductive. You're
like, well, I've got code to write. I've got features to build. Do I really just want to
talk to people on the off chance that they tell me something useful? And a lot of times they won't
tell you that much useful stuff. But here's the thing, if you authentically like the customers
that you're serving, then you're going to want to talk to them anyway, because it's just fun to talk
to people that you like. And then every now and then they're going to say some stuff that changes
your mindset. So with indie hackers, I first built the forum with this very utilitarian goal.
I thought, hey, founders have problems, they need to ask questions, they need to get answers. So
that's what the forum is for. Whereas I've talked to so many indie hackers since then and just
learned how they're actually using it. A lot of people were just like, hey, you know, I get tired
when I'm working or I'm bored at the bus stop. So I open indie hackers because I just want
to learn something. If I'm going to be distracted, I don't want to go on Instagram. I want to be
distracted in a useful way. And I would never know that if I didn't talk to people. And that changes
how I build the forum and what I want it to do. So I can't agree more with what you're saying. I
think founders should really think from the get-go, who do I actually like talking to and try to build
a product for those kind of people? Yeah. And I also don't want to sound like, oh, you have to
go out and talk to 100 people before you launch your product. That's definitely not the case.
You just need to find a good balance. You also don't want to not launch your product for so long
and just sit there and talk to people forever when you could have been getting actual feedback on
your product. I think we did a good job of that early on where we put something out there,
we get a little feedback, we talk to people, we take a break and we build whatever we found,
and then we would launch it. And then we would get feedback on that. It's kind of a cycle. It's
like almost every three weeks, we feel like we kind of shifted our priority back and forth from,
hey, let's figure out what people think about this to let's build it and launch it and go
through all that process and support it. So there has to be a balance on both sides too,
and make sure you're not falling on one side or the other too heavily.
One of the cool things that I know about your business is that you've been working with
contractors. And I think your strategy is you're finding contractors who are pretty entrepreneurial
themselves. A lot of them are indie hackers or would-be indie hackers. And so you're kind of
giving them the opportunity to work part-time on something, finance their lifestyle, while they
also start businesses on the side. How does that work? And how do you find these people? Because
it kind of seemed like the ideal, generalist, early employees to help you out.
Early on, we realized that we wanted to try and avoid having employees just because of all the
administrative headache that comes with that. And early on, we didn't have enough money to pay
employees anyway, so we had to use contractors. And the first contractor that we had was Rob,
who actually is now a partner in our business. We actually found him off Upwork. He had just
graduated and was traveling Europe at the time and was just picking up some hours while he was
traveling. I think he was in Italy at the time. And we started working with him after a couple
months. He was very entrepreneurial as well. He had tried to start up and had some other ideas.
And he just did such great work that we were like, we need to get this guy on board before
he comes up with some product and takes off on his own. That's when it clicked for us. It's like,
oh, we really like these contractors that have other interests and their other businesses that
they're working on but need the contract to pay the bills. We also, in that case too, it's the
hours that they're working are really important. They want to make sure that they keep that job
so that they have that kind of security in their back pocket as they're working on their own
product. So we've done it a lot of different ways. We've found people from Upwork. We have
found people just through LinkedIn searching around. Also, the contractor that really handles
a lot of our marketing, who I also then brought for Wave, and then brought him as a partner for
his subtitle. So we really tried to bring in good people when we find him. He was just a local
connection here in town. So I think it's hard to find great engineers because they're generally
not outed happy hours or certain different events. But sales and marketing people are generally
pretty easy to find around town. If you live in a fairly decent sized city in Charleston,
it's not a big city at all. But we have a little bit of a startup community where you can go meet
connections and also people that you meet through freelancing and past jobs are great to reach out
to. So we've done all those different things and have some success getting those right people in
place. I've had a similar story with Indie Hackers where some of the people we work with,
we found off Upwork. Rosie Sherry, our excellent community manager, is a founder herself.
Yeah, she's great.
She's a guest on the podcast. She bootstrapped her community to a million dollars in revenue,
and now she's running the Indie Hackers community. So it's super cool to be able to work with people
who are founders themselves because they understand the breadth of skills that you have to have and
they're willing to do any part of the job, not just one specific thing. They're just the perfect
early people to work with. I've thought about building something into Indie Hackers itself
to allow Indie Hackers to hire each other.
I would love that. I've actually posted on Indie Hackers. That would be a great way to find people
because somebody's on Indie Hackers and they're working on side projects and stuff,
you know they're motivated. They're fairly generalist, which is really important,
and that they're willing to learn on their own. That's the other thing about employees,
we don't have the ability to on-ramp somebody into a job and train them. We need somebody
that can jump in tomorrow and start working and learning. So that's something else that
is just great about that kind of Indie Hacker mentality that I would really like that.
So what are your personal goals with all of this? I mean, at this point, at least from
the outside looking in, it feels like you've made it. It feels like you've accomplished a
lot of your goals. And as you said, Wave is way bigger than you ever thought it could be.
Where do you want to be in a couple years?
We've been spending a lot of time on this lately. We've been working on Wave for three years and
we're really trying to figure out, we have some ideas of different products that we could add on
to Wave or different big initiatives we could do to grow that business. But we're realizing
there's really four core partners through both products. And we're just really realizing that
we love that initial creative, just that starting and launching process. We really like it. That's
what really motivates us. Of course, the money is great, but the money really is more just an
indicator that it's working and it's worth working on. Now, we're already starting to get the itch
and we're working on a few different concepts of some new products that we want to launch. So,
I think for the foreseeable future, I think we've got a few more in us that we want to try
and a couple of different products. We'll see how those go. Aside from that,
long-term goals, I'm really inspired by a lot of these investment groups that have started popping
up like Tyler at Earnest Capital and there's some other groups like SureSwift and SaaS Group that
are buying and investing in other bootstrap companies. But we got to get a couple more wins
to get to that level. So long-term, I think that would be a lot of fun. But short-term,
we really want to try and do this one or two more times. We're really motivated.
For some reason, we just love putting things out there and trying to make them work.
I remember being a kid and reading about the most successful entrepreneurs and how they would make
a lot of money. They'd be successful with their companies and then they would just work more and
keep doing it. And I never understood it as a kid until I got older and started working on stuff and
realized that it's actually just really fun to do it, especially once you get better at it and
it starts working. And you realize how many different things you can build. You realize how
much of an impact you can have on others and how much fun it is to just be in control of your own
life and building whatever you want. You were able to do this almost your first time out of the gate.
I mean, this is kind of like your first stint as an indie hacker. You've already built several
successful companies. A lot of people I talked to floundered for months or years without any success.
What do you think brand new indie hackers can take away from your approach to things and your story
that would help them succeed?
Well, first off, I feel like I floundered for a long time. So don't feel alone if you feel like
you're doing that. Even there was a whole year before I left my job where I was working on stuff,
thinking about concepts and products. So there was this whole other period before even getting
started that felt like part of the journey as well. So I think the first piece of advice I would get
is entrepreneurship is much more of a journey than it is making one company work. Because even
if you get that first one to work, if you really want to be an entrepreneur, you're probably going
to keep doing it. So that should take some pressure off. The first one doesn't have to be perfect.
As long as you keep a runway in front of you and don't quit your job and blow your savings like I
did, then you can hopefully have a couple more shots. So definitely try and keep the pressure
low and just keep working. Everybody's story is going to be a little bit different. The things
that I think have really helped us is getting a team involved, getting a team in place. You solo
founders out there, I am so impressed when somebody is able to create and bootstrap a SaaS product
and sell it and market it and support it and do all of that all by themselves. Our partners and
I, we just could never imagine doing that. So if you have been struggling for a while by yourself,
one idea would be to go find a co-founder. That's another long process in itself to find the right
partner for long term, but it can be really worth it. So getting the right team in place is really
important. And then just trying to move fast and our success has correlated with our ability to
make decisions quickly. It's something we've gotten a lot better at over the years. So just
moving fast, making decisions and trying to make good, quick, reversible decisions is also good too.
Don't put all your eggs in one basket. Keep things moving along. I'm getting off track a little bit,
but those would definitely be the big picture items that I would advise people to do.
Keep your expectations low. Don't blow through your savings and also don't feel bad if it's hard
because it's hard for everybody. And if at all possible, work with a team of people that you can
move fast and iterate together on ideas with. Baird Hall, thank you so much for coming on the
show and sharing your story and your learnings. Hopefully, I'll have you back on the podcast
again at some point to talk about all these new ideas that you're excited to work on.
Can you let listeners know where they can go to find out more about Wave and subtitle and whatever
else it is that you're working on? Yeah, if you want to check out the products, Wave is
W-A-V-V-E dot C-O, wave dot co, and then subtitle is subtitled with a Z, subtitled dot com. And then
we've created a new brand called LoFi Ventures, L-O-F-I dot ventures, where we're going to be
launching some products under that brand. And we're doing some blogging there as well.
So a lot of the things that we talked about today, some of my partners are writing blog posts as well
about building MVPs and financial modeling, some of that good stuff. So go find us at LoFi dot
ventures. And then all of us are on Twitter as well, probably pretty easy to track down.
So yeah, come talk to us. We would love to interact with some other people. We just all sit in our
kitchens independently and work on these companies. So anytime we get a break to talk to somebody
about their business, it'd be a lot of fun. So definitely reach out to us.
All right. Thanks so much, Barry.
Thanks, Corlin.
Listeners, if you enjoy the show, you should subscribe to the Indie Hacker's podcast
newsletter. Every time there's a new episode out, I just try to send out my thoughts,
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ndhackers.com slash podcast. As always, thank you so much for listening and I will see you next time.