What's up everyone, this is Cortland from IndieHackers.com where I talk to the founders
of profitable internet businesses with the goal of hearing about their stories and what
goes on behind the scenes so that the rest of us can learn from their successes and
their failures.
Today I'm talking to Dawson Whitfield, the creator of LogoJoy.
That name sounds familiar, it might be because I talked to Dawson last year for IndieHackers.com
and this interview was one of the most popular that I've ever done.
I think it hit 100,000 page views in its first 24 hours on the site.
There's a lot of talk about how success never really happens overnight and how it's always
years in the making and I don't think Dawson is necessarily an exception to that rule.
However, LogoJoy, the product that Dawson built, really did take off the second it was
exposed to the public and I think it's fun to hear him analyze why that happened and
tell the story behind it.
So here we are one year later, Dawson, how's it going?
Hey, it's going well, thanks for having me.
Thanks for coming on.
Last year when you were on IndieHackers, your story hit the front page of Hacker News and
it was number one for that entire day but it ended up turning into a little bit of a
scandal.
Do you remember?
What happened was you had just launched LogoJoy and Product Hunt I think a week before doing
your interview for IndieHackers and you made something like $7,000 in that first week.
So I extrapolated to say, oh, LogoJoy is making $15,000 a month which is actually a pretty
conservative estimate.
We said like $28,000 but people on Hacker News still got super upset about it and accused
me of misrepresenting things and so it was kind of a mess.
And then a few months later in March, I get an email from you out of the blue saying,
hey, Cortland, how's it going?
Would you mind updating my revenue on the site?
I'm at $70,000 a month now.
So your growth ended up proving the haters wrong but more than anything, I was just floored
by how fast you grew.
Yeah, it was quite a roller coaster.
Yeah, I appreciate you taking the blame for that but I think it was actually me who extract
it and misrepresented it to you.
I barely even remember all the details but I do know that it turned out okay in the end.
So when we ended up doing the interview, you described LogoJoy to me as an online logo
creator that uses machine learning to make it feel like you're working with a real designer.
Is that still an accurate description of LogoJoy today, a year later?
It is.
It absolutely is.
The one thing that's changing is we're starting to expand our horizons and that we're looking
to really make LogoJoy into a product that can design anything.
Okay.
The logo or business cards or restaurants menu.
We want to really bring our technology to every kind of design.
That sounds crazy ambitious.
Yeah, it's a really hard problem to solve.
The hardest thing about it is a lot of companies are taking Photoshop, simplifying it and putting
it online, combining with beautiful templates and all that, which is a great product for
a lot of people.
But we want to differentiate and say, we're not going to try to make you a designer.
We want to be your designer.
And that's where the real challenges come in.
You're going to do all the hard work for people and let them just have the easy job of clicking
the design that works on.
Exactly.
It's kind of like...
One of our customers say it was kind of like watching TV, it was just so effortless, and
you ended up spending so much time just sort of playing around that you just spent so much
time on it that you ended up finding, in this case, a logo that you loved, but we think
you can find really any kind of design that you love.
Cool.
So let's go back to the beginning of LogoJoy.
How did you come up with the original idea for an AI-powered logo maker?
So I've been a designer my entire life, about 15 or 14 years, doing it somewhat professionally.
Almost a lot of that time I spent doing logos for clients.
So last summer, I was doing a logo for a client.
And the whole process probably took about three weeks.
The client must have spent about $3,000.
And really, at the end of the day, I felt like a glorified font picker.
And it was frustrating for me, because here I am, I've invested my life into being the
best designer that I can, and I truly feel like I'm just getting in the way when I'm
doing this work with these clients.
And it really killed me.
So I went out looking for a product that basically made it easy for entrepreneurs to get a nice
logo, didn't find any, and so decided to build it.
It reminds me of that, I don't know if you've seen that comic by, I think it was The Oatmeal,
where it's a designer making a website for someone, and then they keep basically second-guessing
every decision the designer makes.
And by the end of the whole process, it's the ugliest website in the world.
The designer's so embarrassed to have made it.
It's really at the core of what we're doing.
A lot of our customers love the perfect amount of control that they have over the process.
So it's a fine balance of, we want to be able to give those smart suggestions and things
like that for their design, but they still want to feel like they're someone in control
so they can tell us to show them different fonts or different colors or anything like
that.
So it's really about finding that perfect balance of how much control we actually give
the user.
So when you first came up with the idea, did you have any inkling that it could become
so big?
What were your goals like?
It's funny.
So I don't know if you know this, but my friends make fun of me, well used to make fun of me,
because every month I had a new side project and I'd always get super amped up about them
and then two weeks would go by and I was done with it and ready to move on to the next.
With LogoJoy, I just knew I could tell that this is the one.
It was just that feeling that I had when I was building it.
That sort of excitement lasted more than two weeks and it was such an excitement that I
would wake up and jump out of bed and literally I could not wait to go and sit down and start
working on it.
I just sort of had that feeling, it was like this is what I was meant to do, this is perfect
before I even launched.
What gave you that feeling?
Because I imagine there are other tools out there at the time that help people automate
their designs.
At the very least, there are some templates and logo builders.
So why are you so confident and so excited about what you're doing?
You're right, there were a lot of people doing it and there still are.
I think the biggest one was I had such a, at the time I had such a profound knowledge
of the domain and so I knew that the solution that I, I didn't even have to do user testing.
My project before this was like an HR tool that helped people build employee handbooks
and I had no freaking clue what the hell that space is all about.
So I would do research and I would be like, oh yeah, there's a market for this employee
handbook builder and people spend a lot of money in the industry but that didn't really
get me going.
With LogoJoy, I had been a designer for 12 years and I saw the product and I could imagine
my past clients using it.
I can imagine myself, truly imagine myself using it and so I think that's what it was.
It was just that intense domain expertise that I knew, I just knew this was something
that was needed.
It's fascinating because it strikes me that there are probably thousands or possibly millions
of designers who work with clients and get annoyed at all the back and forth just like
you did.
But probably very few of them come up with an idea to make a product to solve it, especially
not an idea involving AI and machine learning.
So what do you think things were different with you?
Well, I've always been a developer as well.
So I knew how to build it and I could build it, which was pretty exciting.
Being able to actually build your product is just so invigorating that it just fuels
you.
I think that was probably the biggest one, I don't know.
I think just general ambition, I don't really know, I think it's just my personality.
I just love to build products and if I can build a product that does a better job than
I would at something, but for a million more people, I'm going to build that product.
I think that's one of the exciting things about being a founder today because even though
so many people are online and so many people can code, very few people are actually building
stuff.
There's people working every job under the sun, but very few of them are thinking, how
can I improve this job or make it better?
And so if you want to get into it, there's a lot of low hanging fruit and a lot of ideas
that you would think someone has done, but they haven't done or they've done a very crappy
job at it.
And if you're dedicated to it, you can kind of improve it.
So it's a pretty good time to start something new.
It's crazy.
And you look at a space like the logo maker space and like logos have been around for
a long time.
People have been making logos for a very long time.
So rationally, you would think, no, if somebody could have done it by now, someone would have
done it by now.
If someone could have made a really good logo maker, it would have been done already.
And so there's no point in even trying.
But yeah, just by caring so much, people underestimate how actually powerful that is.
Just caring 100 times more than the incumbents.
And what did you think you cared the most about?
Was it just solving the problem or was it making your own life easier or making life
easier for all of designers or starting a successful startup?
What was your primary driver?
I mean, it's like it's kind of superficial, but just like, like building a slick product.
I actually had in my notes, like why I'm doing this, like what I want in the future.
And like, one of the top ones was I just want like a slick product that I'm proud to show
my friends.
And that like makes enough money for me to survive on.
So I think, yeah, I think that's what really motivated me the most in the early days was
just making like a really freaking cool product.
That's a pretty good motivation because it sounds like you're just a builder, a natural
builder of things who enjoys building things for their own sake, at which point you want
to take pride in your work.
And then the question of how do you get out of bed every day is like easily answered because
you're excited to build the thing that you're building, you know, and it's kind of its own
reward.
Absolutely.
And I spent hours, you know, refining the easing and the.
I was talking to one of my designer friends, this guy, Tobias French-Nyder, a few weeks
ago on the podcast, and we were talking about the difference between founders with a developer
background and founders with a designer background.
And I think it's funny because as a designer, you're kind of a perfectionist about the design,
you know, so it kind of slows you down in some parts because you don't want to release
something that you'd be embarrassed about.
Yeah, I think I think there's another little mindset thing there.
Most developers I know are like they care about like cool things you can't like that
are possible, you know, little things to like save time talking to the server and things
like that.
I think designers are a little higher tendency to think about, you know, actually solve problems
and think about, you know, empathizing with the user and thinking about how to, you know,
design a product that solves the user's problem.
Whereas a lot of developers I know, or a lot of developers I know, are like, Oh, yeah,
we could like use this cool technology in this way.
And they don't really connect that with with the actual, you know, problem that they're
that they should be trying to solve.
Yeah, I think it's pretty typical as a developer to be much further removed from, you know,
from the level at which customers are expressing what they want, especially if you're a back
end engineer, you might spend your entire career working on these systems that no customer
will ever see or touch or know that it even exists.
And on one hand, yeah, like these systems enable customers to get what they want.
But on the other, it's so indirect that you don't really speak the same language that
users are speaking.
Yeah.
And I mean, like, a lot of the time some designers will when they're actually designing products,
they'll forget like the 20 different what ifs that a developer will catch.
So that there's there's there's a it goes both ways need for both.
Yeah.
So I think also there's something kind of scary for designers about a future in which
AI can do their job or some large percentage of their job.
And I'm sure it's scary for everyone, to be honest, like the default response is denial,
people say, Oh, that's impossible.
Maybe AI can do some things, but it can't do these other things over here.
And meanwhile, the things that AI can't do are slowly shrinking in scope every year.
Like 10 years ago, designers are probably like AI can never make a good looking logo.
And then today when they see logo joy, they'd be like, okay, I can make a decent looking
logo, but it can't do all the custom details that I can.
And I don't know what things look like 15 to 20 years from now.
But I can see that being one reason why there weren't so many designers lining up to build
an AI logo maker.
Because if you're kind of in denial about it, and afraid of it, you're not going to
do it.
It's like a horse making a car.
Yeah, and as a designer, it hits obviously really close to home for me.
So like, for one, I don't think AI will steal designers jobs, I think designers will always
continue to evolve.
You know, you look back 10 years ago, like you said, if you asked somebody to, you know,
to build a website, you needed to hire a designer developer.
Nowadays, you just go in WordPress or Wix or Webly or whatever, I think designers will
always evolve, you know, maybe in 10 years, we'll need designers to design, you know,
virtual worlds, or, or like, a lot more AR stuff.
So I think there'll be a lot of evolution there.
I think the biggest fear is that the biggest sort of thing for designers is that we are
basically giving the industry a making it look bad.
So like, we're reducing the perceived value of design, because we're saying how you can
get it three or six to five bucks.
And to that, I just say like, doesn't necessarily matter, like all we should be caring about
is what the customer wants, right?
What the small business owner wants, and if we can help them get off the ground faster
with a logo that they love, for, you know, a tenth the price, then that's a good world.
And then it's up to you to think about how you can provide more value.
Yeah, exactly.
It's kind of like being a newspaper editor in the 90s when the internet comes out and
saying, Oh, we shouldn't go online.
This is the inevitable force of progress.
And either you accept it and try to provide more value in a better or new way, or you
kind of rail against it and just eventually become irrelevant.
And maybe one of the lessons here is as well, if you're looking to come up with a business
idea is that if everybody in your industry is afraid of something or in denial about
it, maybe that's a good place to look for creative new ideas.
Yeah, absolutely.
So back to kind of the story of the founding of LogoJoy, you're super excited about it.
You've got this new idea.
You're waking up every day excited to work, and you're not really talking to anybody or
validating your idea.
What were you doing besides just building?
Was it just nothing but building and how long did it take you to get the product out?
Yeah, it was literally just building.
That's the other nice thing about doing something to your domain expectation is you can just
build.
It took two and a half months from idea to launch, basically two and a half months of
pure just coding and design.
I think a lot of people fall into the trap of not talking to anybody and not doing any
research and also not having any real domain expertise.
And so they build something for two or six months, and it doesn't get any traction.
In addition to your domain expertise, were you a fan of any particular startup philosophy?
A lot of people swear by Eric Ries' book, The Lean Startup, a lot of people swear by
Paul Graham's essays.
Is there anything that you subscribe to?
Anything I subscribe to?
I don't know which of my mantras are also mantras of the startup world.
I mean, one thing I did do, it wasn't really talking to users, but I would often...
Well, I did do beta tests with my friends, and I would get some feedback there.
One thing I did was I would look at...
I would do a lot of reading online, I would go to a design agency websites and see how
they talked about their services and how they presented their logos and tried to mimic things
like that.
One of the big things that we did was we showed a lot more.
We didn't do watermarks over our logos.
We showed our logos with a lot of contrast, a lot of white space around them, and some
of the things like that.
I did do a lot of...
I just looked at what the best people in the industry were doing.
Not the best logo makers, but...
Actually, one thing is the whole mantra of think about the job that your customers are
hiring them to sell.
For us, the job that our users were hiring us to solve was building them a logo, a beautiful
logo.
I looked at not other logo makers because I thought they were all crap, but I looked
at who people are hiring right now to get the best logo that they can.
Those are the top 10 agencies in the world.
I looked at how they presented their logos and how they communicated with their clients
and things like that.
I mimicked the pinnacle of the best way we could do it, so I tried to mimic that as closely
as I could.
I think that worked out well.
That's such a good way to go about it, to recognize that it's not only about the product
that you're building and trying to make the best logo maker, but to understand what problem
your clients have and what thing that they really want, what do they value and what do
they desire.
I think it's a hard lesson for a lot of people to learn.
I knew it took me a very long time to learn that lesson.
Where do you think you learned that lesson?
If not entirely from your job as a designer and working with clients, is there any other
thing that influenced you to teach you to think that way?
Honestly, just building and testing out a lot of products, I have one old side project
that took up two years of my life, same kind of thing as a little bit, like 10-hour days.
It just did not have any legs and I only realized two years into it, but that was a really big
learning curve.
After that, I was like, okay, I'm going to make sure that I'm solving a need that people
currently hire other people to do or to solve.
What was the product?
It was called WiseWords and it was an online marketplace for career advice.
We connected students and recent grads with people doing their dream jobs.
Okay, that makes a lot of sense.
It seems like something that people might want.
Yeah, that's what I thought.
I like talking about failure stories because everyone who succeeded has done at least a
handful of things that didn't go over very well.
I think it's interesting to dive into it because all of us learn really what it is that you
learned to get you to the point where you could create something that succeeded really
well.
I love postmortems.
Yeah, the postmortems are great.
Why don't we dive into a little bit more detail on that and what was the process of you figuring
out that it wasn't going to work?
I built the product myself and I was marketing it myself.
During when we were marketing it, then I realized it wasn't going to work.
I liken it to running with a parachute behind you.
This parachute is like the non-product market fit parachute and then you can take it off
when you have product market fit and you can actually run.
It's kind of hard to tell that sometimes though.
I mean, it was a slow realization but it was pretty obvious.
People just didn't stick around and then there was a moment where I was like, okay, this
isn't working.
The business model.
People didn't want to pay for it.
That's probably the biggest one.
People didn't want to pay for it.
Yeah, that sounds rough.
What kinds of things did you try to get people to pay for it?
Or was it a situation where you tried one thing and it didn't work out so you kind of
just cut your losses?
No, we tried.
I tried everything.
On the checkout page, I added all these great benefits of working with a getting mentorship.
I tried to be like the matchmaker so I would send out like 100 emails a day saying, hey,
John, you should talk to Sarah and vice versa.
What else?
Yeah, I did a lot of it.
It's kind of blurred for me.
I did a lot of just kind of wild things for them.
That's such a tough problem to solve and I haven't seen very many matchmaking services
with the exception of dating apps really take off in a big way.
I think both people who are being matched have to be at sort of the right place and
point in their lives to be matched for whatever purpose and you really need to find something
where you can match people frequently instead of just once and then they're done.
So it's really just a tough problem to solve and to get people to pay for.
Yeah, it was really hard.
The hardest thing was that all the mentorship sessions were over the phone.
Oh, you know, it was a really bad time.
When Google launched, they launched help outs and I was like, alright, cool, like they're
validating the, and this is when I was like halfway through, they're validating the industry.
This is good.
And then Google shut down help outs and help outs was like doing the same thing that I
was doing and I was like, oh, well, this might be a sign.
So that was a bad one.
It's rough stuff, but here you are years later and you find yourself working on yet another
project that you're super excited about and you're spending 10 hours a day on it and you're
excited and optimistic about the launch, even though it's not clear that things are going
to work out in the end.
And of course, now we know in hindsight that it did work out, but tell us about the weeks
leading up to launch and how you got ready to unveil your project to the world.
So I did a lot of beta testing.
I had a pretty good inkling that this was going to be a success.
I was hoping out of the gates.
So I had a lot of my friends do I had like a Facebook group with my friends doing beta
testing.
Yeah.
And you know, but I really didn't focus too much on the marketing plan.
It was really just sort of built in all my other products.
I've really focused on the marketing plan and I've spent like the last two weeks with
the product being ready to launch, working on like how to like launch on day one.
And I've learned that you should never have like a launch date.
It should always like be a slow rollout.
I had a Chris Messina posted on I had like this form on his website to like for like
people to ask him to post stuff on product for them.
So I did that and I was lucky enough to have him post it for me.
And yeah, it was it was I mean, the weeks spent up we're really just building in building
it, refining the design of it, and just heads down coding, almost almost no on the still
marketing.
Why do you think this slow rollout method worked better for you?
And why did you how did you go from doing these big marketing pushes to this totally
new approach?
Because the marketing pushes have never worked.
And it's always a letdown, it's always a letdown.
And like to launch your product and have a letdown on the first day is like, it can be
devastating and can really just deflate you.
So I've learned to just have like, almost no expectations when I launch.
And you can do that by just launching when the product is like, okay.
And once you have like no expectations when you launch, then you haven't like exhausted
all of your enthusiasm before you launch.
And then so this way, when you like launch, when it's like just okay, you still have like
all this fire inside of you to carry it on when it's actually out there, which is 99.9%
of the work.
Yeah, there's so many guides online that are like 100, you know, checklist items need to
do before you launch and you read those and it's just so overwhelming.
Like, there's no way I'm going to do all of this, it sounds exhausting, I'm probably
going to miss half of it.
And then if you I can't imagine doing all of those things, and then having the launch
just flop and still wanting to like keep going.
Yeah, exactly.
I think people really underestimate the psychological aspect of building a product.
And they don't really take it into account when they're doing their planning.
And if you set yourself up for these huge failures, where your expectations are massive,
and it all hinges on one moment of time, and when things don't go well, you're going to
quit.
And if you quit, you won't win.
Yeah.
And then also, I found that marketing a product, like just focusing on marketing once you've
already launched is also helpful.
Because it's a lot more like you're a lot more sort of inspired and excited to market
something that's actually out there.
Like I love being able to have an idea, for example, like a marketing idea and being able
to do it that same day, when you're like thinking of marketing ideas before you launch, first
of all, you're taking time away from building it.
And second of all, it's not as exciting.
And you probably won't be as motivated to do it if you haven't launched it.
Yeah, not at all.
And I think another thing worth mentioning is even if you do have a big launch that goes
really well, the weeks after that, or most of the time, not that great, they're kind
of discouraging.
And I think for you, you ended up growing a ton.
But I remember when I launched a new hackers, I kind of had this no expectations, I'll launch
it when it's done.
And I think on like a Wednesday, I was like, you know what, I'm launching tomorrow.
And I emailed a few people to let them know.
And it went really well.
And then the next three weeks, I think the traffic was lower every single day than it
had been the day before.
And I had no idea where the bottom was going to be.
I just thought it was going to go all the way down to zero was super stressful.
And so I kind of regretted doing this huge launch out of the gate, I wish that I had
like slowly rolled it out.
So at least have like, you know, the happiness of seeing the traffic go up instead of down
every day.
Yeah, absolutely.
So let's fast forward back to the present.
You launch logo joy makes $7,000 in its first week, then you do an ending hackers interview
that blows up.
You email me a few months later in March and tell me that logo joy is doing $70,000 a month
in revenue.
Where's logo joy today?
How big is it?
And how much revenue are you guys generating?
Yeah, so it's it's by the way, it's almost been a year.
Yeah, pretty close.
So yeah, it's been quite the roller coaster.
We are up to 24 employees.
Yeah, we're doing about 300,000, just over $300,000 a month.
It's Canadian.
Wow.
It's been quite exciting, not lots of growth.
Our first summer, which was, we realized the seasonality of business.
That was terrifying.
Yeah.
Yeah, we had a couple of months in somewhere where not we had down months and like, yeah,
I was like, Oh, shit, like, this is it, we're going back.
You wouldn't think that like, a logo maker would have would be really that seasonal.
What's what happens in the summer?
It's just I mean, people, I had a couple conversations with some industry veterans, and they sort
of confirm this people would like businesses just start last in the summer, I guess, people
are you know, they're off on vacation, stuff like that.
So we made it through, and yeah, we moved into our own office here on Toronto.
Yeah, I haven't really followed up with you since we last talked.
So I had no idea that you were at 24 employees.
We did our indie hackers interview was just you by yourself, right?
So you added all of those people since then.
Yeah, that was just me.
It's crazy, the whole idea of just being in a situation when you're a one man shop, and
you can grow to be pretty much anything that you want.
You can stay indie, and small and treat this as like a one man business.
So you can try to expand your team as fast as possible.
And you've got, you know, funding decisions to you could bootstrap, or you can raise money
from outsiders.
What was going through your head when you saw things starting to explode early on?
And how did you decide which path that you're going to follow?
What's what's funny is that there was no like, conscious decision.
I realized this afterwards, I just sort of by default was like, alright, sweet, I can
hire someone now and like, I can, like get someone to help me market it and like, get
someone to help develop it and do support.
And only until we were like, you probably like 15 people was I like, oh, shit, you know
what?
Like, not that I would ever want to I was like, I should like I can, I could have just
like stayed in the and be making, you know, whatever it was.
Yeah, I mean, for me, it was it was, you know, when I when I started Logan, like, I don't
want to live life to achieve, like, good success, like, I want to, like change the world, right?
Like, I want to make something that that everyone in the world knows about, you know, every
entrepreneur uses.
For me, there was no, no conscious decision to stay indie or to, to grow it, it was just
growing, obviously.
And then with with, you know, whether to raise money or to stay bootstrapped, that was a
very hot topic.
And even with investors, I had like, very prominent sort of advisors be like physically
angry at me for like, why are why are you raising money?
Why don't you just bootstrap?
But we wanted to because we're not we don't have recurring revenue.
And we wanted to grow pretty aggressively.
Along with our, our revenue, we needed money in the bank as padding.
Just you know, for when December rolls around, or, or when the summer rolls around, I knew
we need to raise money, we ended up raising 900k, just sort of to have, you know, dive
into a little bit, but mostly just to have it in the bank.
So tell me about that fundraising process, because it's not something that I really talk
about very often on the podcasts.
And I think a lot of people who are listening would be curious to hear what it's even like
to do that.
Like, how do you raise money from investors?
It's brutal.
It sucks.
It's, I mean, I guess some people like it, but I imagine most like indie hackers, I would
not like it.
I don't like it.
Well, I probably like it now.
But when I had to do it, when I had to I just want to be like building product.
It's demoralizing, because you are talking, you know, you think your business, I was like
super pumped.
We were doing at the time, I don't know, whatever it was 100,000 a month, but I would tell investors
that and they're like, yeah, but it's not recurring.
I was like, well, shit.
So it's super demoralizing.
You have to like, what was really important was a big learning curve for me is I didn't
know why we needed it.
And to investors, that's like a big red flag.
If you're not deliberate about every single major business decision, that's like a sign
of an inexperienced founder.
So yeah, that was a big one for me.
I had to really think thoroughly on like why we wanted to raise money and why we didn't
want to bootstrap.
And that, as I said, was because we need that buffer and we want to grow aggressively with
our revenues.
How many how many investors did you talk to?
And how many knows did you have to get before you started getting some yeses?
And I thought I like I was like, we have revenue, like we have product market fit.
I don't know, like every single, you know, everyone else said everyone else got knows
we're going to get yeses.
We probably got I probably talked to about 4045 investors.
And eventually about 10 said yes.
Okay, that's not too bad.
It's not like a disaster story.
I've heard 100 sometimes in the past.
Yeah, it wasn't it wasn't that bad.
But I was frustrated as hell.
Every time an investor said no to me, I'm like, the hell are you thinking my one of
I was like, it sounds bad, but like I was like, I'm gonna prove you so wrong.
And eventually, eventually, once you get enough knows, you're like, well, it might not work
with his portfolio, their his or her portfolio or something like that.
Yeah, I say that I've heard worse stories in the past.
But honestly, if you get told no, even five or 10 times, that can be pretty devastating.
It's super crushing.
Yeah, it's an absolute roller coaster.
I like what you said about the investors really wanting to see that you're not just making
decisions haphazardly, that you're very deliberate and confident and that you're planning and
you have foresight to kind of predict what's coming up and make decisions accordingly.
Otherwise, I'll think that you're an inexperienced founder.
And what's crazy is that if you're growing a company as fast as you did, you probably
feel some degree of inexperience, no matter what, like you're riding this big wave.
And on one hand, of course, you want to do things to push things forward and make the
wave bigger. But on the other, you don't want to fuck things up.
Is that something that you've ever worried about or been afraid of?
Yeah, I mean, like, I know I'm not afraid of it.
Well, maybe I am.
I think one of the biggest things that I've learned is just like embracing the fact that
this is like a super exciting journey that you're on.
You're not going to know everything you are new to this.
And one of the most profound things is somebody told me that the most growth that you'll ever
experience comes from pain.
Investors say, no, your business is not going to work for these three reasons.
That is painful.
But it means the next time you go into an investor meeting, you're going to be able
to say, my business will not die because of these three reasons.
And you can counter it before they even say it.
So I think, yeah, I think emotionally just being aware that it's going to be a storm.
It's going to be chaotic.
Everyone goes through it.
And what's exciting, the most exciting thing for me is whenever I experienced some sort
of major setback, I say I imagine myself a year from now and I say, holy crap, I am going
to be so much stronger, so much more experienced, and I'm going to be a much better person because
of these challenges that I'm going through today.
Because I know I will get through them.
What are some of the things that you can look back on to like the Dawson of a year ago and
say that, okay, I've grown as a person or as a founder in these ways?
So one of the biggest ones, again, when talking to investors is how you present yourself,
how quickly you talk.
If you don't know the answer to a question, how you are straight up about that and don't
sort of fumble your words.
So yeah, I would say one of the biggest ones is just and even when you're talking to potential
employees or actual employees, is just being very aware of how you present yourself and
how that sort of should change depending on the context.
So for example, when you're chatting with investors, it's really important to talk slowly
and to seem a little more like you have all the answers, like you are confident in everything
you say you are sure of, whereas if you're chatting with a team member, it's actually
better not to pretend like you know everything.
It's important to talk with a little more like doubt in your voice so they don't take
your word as whatever gospel or sorry, they don't take your word as the prescriptive answer.
So they're actually not afraid to challenge you.
So I think that's the biggest one is just how you present yourself in different contexts.
And what about pain?
Because you talked about growing from pain and part of that was the downturn in the summer
and part of that was getting told no by investors.
But are there any other painful things and experiences that you've learned from or any
nerve wracking decisions that you've had to make running LogoJoy?
Yeah, there was one that happened the other day.
So I've since brought on a co-founder, a good friend of mine, Rauge.
And this is at the end of the summer when we're going through the financials.
And he trusts me to have a very good grip on the financials, obviously, it's critically
important.
And there was a moment where we basically sat down with the spreadsheet in front of
us and he said, this is not right, this is not right, this is not right.
And we are actually in a much sort of worst position than I thought we were financially.
I felt like a complete failure.
I felt like I had not done sort of like one of the my main jobs, you know, he was counting
on me to have discovered and I just dropped the ball.
So that that was a major one that I've learned.
And I think from there, I think one of the biggest sort of learnings from that is if
you take on a job, you better be damn sure you're going to be able to do it well.
And when I say well, I think if you were I always think if I were to hire someone to
do this job for me, how would I expect them to do it?
How well would I expect them to do it?
And I do it that well or better.
And so that's that was sort of a big, big pain and a big learning curve for me.
You know, I think one of the helpful lessons to come out of that as well, that's kind of
ancillary, but it's just how helpful it can be to have a co founder, because it doesn't
sound like this is a mistake that you're going to have caught by yourself.
And yet regardless of what happened, you kind of indirectly fixed it and advanced by being
prescient enough to say, hey, even though I'm running the super booming business by
myself, I should bring in a co founder to help me out.
And I don't think very many people would have made that decision.
Absolutely.
Yeah, I mean, it's in that stream, like, it's all about surrounding yourself with people,
you know, co founders or just generally team members surrounding yourself with people who
really, really care, you know, putting a structure in place that makes them care.
So whether it's giving them equity, or giving them, you know, a voice, or, you know, putting
a lot of trust in them, surrounding yourself, yourself, people that really care.
So you've got 23 or 24 people working with you on logo joy right now.
And it's funny that when you describe how you made that decision about how fast you
wanted to grow and what type of company you wanted to be, that almost wasn't even a decision
for you, you just kind of automatically knew that what you wanted to do was hire people
and grow as fast as you could.
And I know a lot of people who would make the exact opposite decision, like the last
thing they want to do is have to manage people.
I think it's especially common among people who are builders of things because their skill
and their desire and their expertise lies with building things and they don't really
have management experience.
So I'm curious what your management experience looked like and why you were so confident
in hiring people and the kinds of things that you've learned since you started growing your
company.
What's brutal is those like, well, for me, it was like three or four months for a lot
of people.
I imagine it's like a year or two that you go that sort of transition period from building
a product to building a company.
That's really hard because you can't do both well.
So for me, there was like three or four months where I was doing two things, not very well.
And so that sucks.
But I think for me, you know, I'm the kind of person and I think a lot of entrepreneurs
are like this where like my main driver is not like writing code, it's not designing,
it's fulfilling the potential that I see in myself, right?
And you just, I don't see myself doing that by, you know, staying in sketch and designing
checkouts as much fun as that is.
I just don't see it.
So you know, during this phase, that's sort of the silver lining that I saw is the transition
sucks.
I acknowledge that and prepare for it.
But on the other side, is a person you who is, you know, much closer to their sort of,
you know, life goal of for me, it was sort of fulfilling my potential in myself.
And I think for a lot of people just experiencing that being able to look back a year ago, and
look at how much you've grown as a person is incredibly satisfying.
Yeah, that's one of my favorite feelings as well, to just be able to look back at your
old self and think, geez, what was I thinking?
And then to know that that feeling means that you've come a long way.
Anyway, we've covered some of the more negative pain points that you've gone through and learning
experiences.
But let's shift gears to some more positive stuff.
If you had to say, what would be the things that are most responsible for logo joy being
so successful?
Why do you think this company has worked out so well?
Well, I think we just sort of got lucky the right time.
I mean, the people, the people in the company are just so amazing.
They all, yeah, again, they all just care so much.
You know, we all sort of see ourselves as part of this, like, you know, all star team,
and we're taking on the world, and there's so much potential in front of us, and we're
just like all, you know, gassed up and ready to go, go get it.
So that's probably just instilling that sort of culture of let's go get it in the company.
It's been a big one.
I mean, with the product itself, I think we've got a good balance of, you know, really caring
about the design, but not too much that we don't release a feature because it doesn't
look that great.
There's a balance there that I've had to, you know, sacrifice some design on.
So it's that balance of, yes, we really care about the design, but we also want to be quick
and release features, and we want to, you know, allow one developer to build an entire
feature because that'll be, you know, a lot quicker than having him work with another
developer and a designer and things like that.
So yeah, I think the biggest thing that is responsible for our success is just releasing
features quickly, not like needing to analyze everything before we test or like do this
big QA thing, we just sort of get out there and see.
One thing I find fascinating is that even at the beginning, you guys were in a pretty
crowded market with a ton of competitors, and they might not have been doing exactly
what you guys were doing.
And they definitely weren't doing as good of a job.
But by now, you've got probably a lot scarier competitors.
I mean, you've got to have at least a few companies who've just outright copied exactly
what you've done and are now competing against you.
Despite all that, you guys are still killing it, you're growing in headcount, your revenue
is much higher than it was earlier in the year.
So I have to ask, did you think about the competition at all?
And is it something that worries you?
Yeah, we've had at least three people like exactly copy our code and just put it up on
another domain that are still running today.
Actually, thankfully, that's no longer possible.
But why we are still winning over the competitors?
I mean, the good news is that competitors will rarely kill you at this scale.
Even if you have major competitors, people will still end up clicking on your ad before
theirs.
And if you're good enough at converting them, you can still own that customer.
So there's a lot of customers to go around right now.
I don't look at really any other logo makers.
I mean, when there's a new one, I'll check it out just to make sure it's not as good
as the old ones, the other ones.
There have been some pretty good ones that have launched in the last year.
But again, the scale is so small that I just worry about it is a waste of energy.
Yeah, so I'm really not worried about our competition.
When I look at, quote unquote, competition, I look at basically the competition in where
we want to go.
So when I imagine logo join two years, who is our competition at that size?
And then I look at them.
So again, that's looking at design agencies, when hopefully we'll be sort of competing
with them in two years.
That's looking at products that, as I mentioned, we want to move into all other kinds of design.
So looking at products that offer all other kinds of design.
Looking at them and what that landscape looks like.
Yeah, so it's really sort of like looking at our competitors two years from now and
seeing what they're doing.
Yeah, I think that's a smart way to approach it to always be looking forward to where you
want to go rather than worrying about who's catching up from behind you.
Because if you're always looking back and worried about that, then it really means you're
not moving fast enough by the time other people catch up to you should already be months or
years ahead of where you were at that point.
Yeah, and I just wouldn't stress a lot of the like whenever a new local maker comes
up on the team, people actually people get like spooked, they're like, Oh, shit, like
a new local maker, they're gonna steal 20% of our business.
That's never the case.
Never the case.
Like there are people underestimate how many customers there are to go around.
Maybe you're advertising and on Facebook, and like, you know, competitors aren't every
advertising on Facebook.
There are a lot of customers throughout.
Exactly.
Your competitors don't have to die in order for your business to succeed and the vast
majority of industries.
And it's a shame more people don't realize this because people will get discouraged and
not start a company just because they see that other people are doing similar things.
On a related note, you mentioned Facebook ads, and it makes me curious, how does Logo
Joy grow?
I mean, every business at the top of their list, the number one thing they want is more
traffic, more users, more customers, more revenue.
How do you guys get customers in the door at Logo Joy?
So our first like five months, our growth was 100% fuel, well, apart from indie actors,
was 100% fueled by adwords.
So we would spend a dollar to acquire a customer, and about four days later, we would get a
dollar 10 back from them.
So that was our entire marketing plan for the first four or five months.
That would not be scalable.
The only reason we were able to hire people and to move into office and all that was because
of SEO.
So nowadays, about 55% of our new users come from just organic SEO, we've really pushed
hard on that.
And then just word of mouth is where we've seen the most natural organic growth up until
now.
I imagine for something like logo makers, SEO has got to be super competitive because
there can't be that many terms that people are searching for to find you guys.
That's basically logo maker.
Exactly.
So what do you guys do to win that race?
Thankfully, Google is moving towards and Google is pretty smart.
We got there organically.
We got there without even trying.
And then once we were there, we were like, oh my god, this is hugely profitable.
Let's start trying.
So we ended up, what do we do?
We have a great PR person, Melissa.
We incentivize people to share us.
I truly believe that social sharing does have an impact on SEO.
So we have a lot of social sharing.
And then we work with a lot of, we give out free logos if someone wants to review us.
And yeah, we work with some bloggers and some publicists to get our name out there.
Yeah, SEO is such a dark art.
I mean, nobody works for Google, nobody knows exactly how their algorithm works.
And so the best we can do is guess.
Even if we hit on something that kind of works right now, who's to say it's going to work
a month from now or a year from now.
So it's kind of fun to talk to people like you whose businesses benefit so heavily from
search engine optimization and traffic.
Yeah, one thing I love is doing microsites.
So we have one called How to Make a Logo.
It was inspired by a crew.
They had a microsite called How to Make, How Much to Make an App, which outlined how much
it would cost to make an app.
But we have one called How to Make a Logo, and it's been super popular, basically outlines
like every option there is to make a logo.
And that's been, and we have a couple other microsites in the works, and those have been
pretty beneficial.
I think microsites and these kind of side project marketing type things are so smart
because not only do they help you on the search engine rankings, but they also help you provide
value to your customers.
I mean, you're literally just making something that's helpful for them, which is always a
good thing to do.
I mean, if nothing else, you'll learn a lot from that experience.
And the alternative content marketing is something that's not for everybody.
Not everybody wants to be on the content treadmill.
Not everybody likes writing.
So if you prefer coding and making products, and maybe that's what you're better at, then
you can build a side project or a microsite that's geared towards bringing in traffic.
Yeah, exactly.
And the thing is, bloggers and publishers, they don't link to other blogs as much as
they used to.
It used to be 10 years ago when you liked a blog post, one of the ways that you would
show that appreciation is by linking to them.
Nowadays, that doesn't really happen, or it happens a lot less.
So you have to look at it like, what are people actually, what's actually worthy?
I guess what's worthy of a mention in a blog post is that bar is just going higher and
higher and higher.
And it's why microsites are becoming more and more popular, because a microsite is much
more worthy of a link than a blog post.
Yeah.
If you're going to get on the top of Hacker News or Designer News or any of these sites,
you're going to get a lot more content than probably people are more likely to talk about
a substantive, interactive microsite.
Yeah, except for indie hackers.
Except for indie hackers, it's all content.
But luckily, I don't write it all by hand, otherwise I would fall over dead.
So on a more personal note, I'm curious about how your life has changed in the past year,
because you've suddenly gone from, I guess, freelancing and working on these smaller projects
to being thrust into this role where you're running a company of 20 people.
What does that do to a person, especially a person who's not necessarily expecting
it?
Are you stressed out all the time?
Are you loving life or both?
I'm loving life, man.
One thing I learned is that it's so easy to be stressed out all the time.
If you don't deliberately get a grasp of your mindset, you're going down.
You're going to get stressed out.
You're going to be always frustrated, always irritable.
One thing that has changed about me is I'm really good at talking to myself and really
good at getting a grip on my emotions.
So now, if something really stressful happens, like we're slapped with a legal claim or something
like that, my heart doesn't sink anymore.
I don't get super stressed out.
I say, all right, I've handled things even harder than this before.
It's going to sound really bad at first, but with these things, they always sound better
the next day.
Let's just stay cool.
That's one of the big things that's changed me is just staying.
I spend an hour every night just making sure I'm mentally okay.
That's one big one.
What else?
One thing, you're a lot more humble.
It's amazing.
What happens to you overall is amazing.
One of the best things is you are so much more confident in a really good way, I think.
It's not like you're super cocky because you're this big CEO or whatever.
You're just a lot more comfortable in your own skin, truly comfortable in your own skin.
You stop caring what people think of you.
You're just a lot more...
It's like a really healthy confidence that you feel like you always had in you, but now
because you're in this position, you're in a pretty high position, that's enough for
you.
Just because that's enough for you and your confidence is great.
That's really awesome to hear.
I especially like the point about if you dive into the deep end, you're going to accumulate
experiences that are hard, and then when you run up against other hard things, you really
can say, I've been through worse.
You really can say, oh yeah, I can for sure survive this because I survived that other
thing and I was twice as hard.
I think a lot of people listening in are just considering building a business online or
maybe they're looking for an idea or they've taken a few steps without much success so
far.
What would be your advice for someone in that situation?
One big one is that was literally me exactly a year ago.
A year ago today, I was in my living room, had one month of rent left in my bank account
and I was just coding on this side project that I thought might be a thing.
I think if I heard someone say that, I think I'd be a little more motivated to keep working
on it.
But I think, yeah, if I already give one piece of advice, it's just to know that it's fully
possible for your side project to blow up.
The most common thing is that it takes years and years and years for something to even
start showing any signs of traction like Airbnb or something like that.
I think a much more exciting thing is that it's actually possible for you to launch something
and then in a year, it'd be a big company and your solid growth and making a good amount
of revenue and really making a difference in the world.
That's fully possible, which is really exciting to know.
I think just be aware that it's fully possible and just keep building.
Keep building.
Yeah, you know, I mentioned this earlier, but it's exciting to know that we're living
in a time where one person can accomplish so much and it's wise to keep your expectations
low and not put a ton of pressure on yourself.
But if you're ambitious and you do the best that you can, it's also motivational to know
that you can build something that succeeds pretty quickly.
Anyway, thanks for coming on the show, Dawson.
It's been great having you.
Can you tell listeners where they can go to learn more about you personally and the things
that you're up to at LogoJoy?
Yeah, I believe, yeah, you can go to my sort of personal website.
It's just DawsonMoodfield.com and yeah, LogoJoy is at LogoJoy.com.
All right.
Thanks, Dawson.
Thanks so much.
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