What's up, everyone? This is Cortland from IndieHackers.com, and you're listening to
the IndieHackers podcast. On this show, I talk to the founders of profitable internet
businesses, and I try to get a sense of what it's like to be in their shoes. How did they
get to where they are today? How did they make decisions at their companies and in their
personal lives? And what exactly makes their businesses tick? And the goal here is always
so that the rest of us can listen and learn from their examples and go on to build our
own successful businesses.
Joining me in today's episode is Matt Verlack, the CEO of a company called Uplaunch. He has
one of the most unique origin stories from IndieHacker that I think I've ever heard.
Matt was actually a career fireman for 10 years. He met his co-founder in the firehouse.
He then learned a code, left his job as a fireman. And since then, Matt has successfully
bootstrapped his company Uplaunch to over $65,000 a month in revenue. That's an amazing
story. I think it exemplifies what's possible in the world that we live in today. So I'm
excited to jump into it. Matt, welcome to the show, man. And thank you so much for joining
me.
Obviously, very excited, Cortland. Thanks for having me, man.
It took you about a year and a half with your very first tech business to get to the point
where you're making $65,000 a month in revenue. That is no small feat.
It's been quite the journey, man. It's funny. It's just like a different lesson learned
every day. But I'm just super grateful for how things have been going so far.
What's your favorite thing about finding yourself in this position in such a short period of
time where you're running a very profitable, successful tech business?
Honestly, there's two. So we work with primarily independently owned and operated fitness facilities,
microgims, CrossFit gyms, and things of that nature. And our big value proposition of the
thing that we do to help is that we help these gym owners run more profitable businesses
by creating a world-class client experience and leveraging really strong relationships.
So really, it's the same benefit, which is that we get to either directly or by proxy
improve people's lives. So we're helping our direct customers, the gym owners, be able
to kind of systematize and run their business more efficiently. We're helping them deliver
a stronger message to their customers. Then more recently, as revenue has grown and we've
started to scale a team, we've seen the ability to positively impact people who have joined
our team and provide them with a really healthy work environment, meaningful work where they're
valued and making incredible contributions to the overall uplaunch ecosystem.
So it's been kind of a human-oriented reward in all of the different areas. But the team
aspect of it is especially new and especially rewarding as well.
Yeah. So for you, it's all about the people, the people you work with, the people that
you work for, your customers.
Totally.
And it's the same for me too with any hackers, which is funny because that's not what I predicted
going into it. I thought a lot more about the programming tasks and my day-to-day work.
But the reality is my favorite part of my job is getting to meet all sorts of cool people,
doing cool things, and just being friends with them.
Yeah, definitely. Any business has to make money in order to survive and help people.
That's kind of a given. But I think getting past that, it's not one of these things where
we're like, oh, I got this idea. We're going to go make a billion dollars. Look at us.
It was just kind of this thing that happened and caught a little bit of traction. So it's
been really cool to meet all the different people we've met and help all the different
people we've helped. So it's been fun.
So we've got to talk about your earlier career, at least a little bit, because quite frankly,
I don't know if I'm ever going to have an ex-fireman on the podcast again. What was
your life like as a fireman and how did you get into that in the first place?
Yeah, it was similar to the way that I got into running a tech company. It was kind of
just by happenstance. I started out as a volunteer firefighter and just kind of enjoyed it and
started going to some additional schools. I got my paramedic certification and thought
it would be a good, meaningful way to spend a life. It's interesting. I was really leaning
into that career. I really enjoyed it. I'd gotten promoted and was in charge of a company,
which was really rewarding, a company meaning a small company of firefighters. All that
was really, really good. The life is an interesting life. It is pretty demanding from a time standpoint.
The department I was working for was at 56 hours a week, not including overtime. You
are away from your family a lot, which I didn't really care as much about until I got married
and had kids. Then I kind of understood that there are some other things that I'd like
to be doing as well. Even then, it was just kind of the life that I was ready to have.
I met Jake, my co-founder, in the firehouse. Jake was in the Marine Corps before the fire
department as an infantryman and then joined the fire department. It's always because of
those roots been really into physical fitness. He opened up a CrossFit gym in his hometown
of Gettysburg, Pennsylvania. That's really how this whole origin of the company began
was just like Jake and I kind of true to form, hacking our way through different strategies
or tactics to keep the marketing and outreach elements of his business afloat while we were
at the firehouse for 24 hours at a time, 60 hours a week. It was kind of deconstructing
and solving that problem that led to the proliferation of up-launchers a couple of years after.
Do you remember the point at which startups and tech and entrepreneurship first popped
onto your radar as something that might be of interest to you?
I don't know that there was a specific inflection point where I was like, actually, this might
be cool to do. There's a lot of firefighters with other jobs because we work a lot of hours
and it's 24 hours at a time, but then you've got a few days off. Initially, it was one
of those things where I'm like, yeah, I'm still going to do the fire department thing
and then I'm also going to run this company and everything is cool.
We grew it a little bit under that model. It was just one of those things where the
business, like the growth that we were having and the demands, like if we really wanted
to do this right, it was one of those things where eventually you just can't ride the fence
anymore. Actually, I credit my wife for kind of pushing me to make that decision as many
spouses do where we tried after the birth of our second son and we just had to kind
of have the conversation where she's like, look, I don't really care which job you do,
but if you could just pick one, that would be awesome.
The issue is kind of the catalyst for me to think about like, hey, maybe this is going
to be something real where I can do it full time and it'll be my career. There were a
lot of appealing things about that. I mean, we're a fully distributed team. We all work
from home. It gives a little bit of, actually gives a lot of flexibility into the day to
day. I run a very outcome driven team where I'm not really interested in time tracking
or clocking in or any of that kind of stuff. It does allow for, I don't really like the
term work-life balance. I think more like work-life integration where your job can fit
your life and your life can fit your job. That was definitely appealing.
The other reality in the fire department, obviously there's a lot of leadership lessons
that can be gleaned from that career. One of them is leading by example and what that
comes down to is if I can't bet on myself to like dive in head first to this company,
how could I ever ask anybody else to bet on our company, whether that's a team member
or an investor or a customer or anything else? I said, if we're going to do this for real,
then I got to be on point. Let's go. I've made the decision and here we are.
It's fascinating that you said that most firemen have other jobs because you have time off.
You can fill out whatever you want. I think your story illustrates the times that we live
in because even just a few years ago, I don't think people would have expected a fireman's
other job to be starting a tech company.
It's really one of the most interesting things about the fire department is it's still like
a vocation. You still have to do the work. You still have to break a sweat. It's still
like hard, dirty, sweaty, blue collar work at the end of the day, which I love by the
way.
But at the same time, you're right. The times are different where firemen have had part-time
jobs for decades, but it was painting or carpenters or doing things like that. There's a lot of
guys that still do that and I've done part-time work like that as well, but I think when you
look at – there's a couple of factors. I think that the talent pool that's applying
to the fire department is a little bit different and more diverse interests than it has been
in decades past and also the access to this knowledge through the popularization of bootcamps
and things like Lambda School, which is totally groundbreaking the way they're doing things.
There's a lot more access to be able to develop your personal skill set.
I think one of the results of that is in public service jobs like the fire department, you're
seeing a more diverse set of skills within the population that does those jobs.
I'm always looking at macro trends. Why are more people becoming indie hackers today than
ever before? I usually take a top-down view where I'm asking questions like what resources
are available today that didn't used to exist? How easy is it to learn how to code today?
How expensive is it to put your website up on a server and host that? But it's interesting
to hear your perspective because at the individual level, there's always some deeply personal
story or reason why you decide to quit what you're doing and take a different path.
I can only imagine. I haven't listened to a ton of indie hacker podcast episodes. I've
listened to a couple, but in general in the ecosystem, there's a lot of people that I
think are like, oh, I hated my job doing XYZ. Then I decided to start my own business because
I wanted to do something that gave me more gratification. I loved my job as a fireman.
I was going to work for 33 years and maximize my pension and I knew exactly what age I was
going to retire at and I had everything planned out because it's that kind of job.
There are people who basically fell out of their chairs in astonishment when I told them
I was leaving. It's one of those jobs that you don't really leave. Unless you're kind
of a – I don't know. It's a nice way to say this. Screw up. Or someone who's not
really fully engaged in the job to begin with. Most people get in that job. It's extremely
competitive which is another thing people don't realize. They hired 30 people off a
list of 2,500 when I applied. People don't leave. It was definitely kind of an anti-pattern
within that context too to go do this other thing, leave one job that I loved for a big
old question mark which was up lunch.
I've been into tech my entire life. There's never a point where you could have asked the
people around me, hey, what does Cortland want to do? They couldn't have told you exactly
what I want to do. What was it like for you being in the exact opposite situation? What
was it like having these conversations where people were falling out of their chairs because
you told them, hey, I'm pulling a 180 and quitting my job as a fireman?
It was interesting to say the least. I don't really know because I'm the kind of person
where I'll really do my best to think through a decision from all the different angles but
once I make it, it's made. I wasn't really in feedback solicitation mode when I was telling
people I was leaving. The decision was already done. I had maybe a dozen people who I trusted
who knew, the guys that I supervised in the fire department knew that I was thinking about
taking this route and then I just said, all right, well, let's go because it's risky and
it might be a little crazy to literally turn your back on a guaranteed pension for life
to go do something that has an extremely high failure rate, meaning start a tech startup
but I'm not really a big fan of regret or worrying about what ifs. I figured it was
time to give it a whirl and that was it. I didn't really put much more thought into it.
Before you had to tell people the results of your decision, you had this whole process
where you had to actually make the decision to leave. I want to talk about what went into
that process and maybe the best place to start is the origin story behind how you met your
co-founder and how you guys first started working together.
Like I said, he started the gym. Jake knew I was like a secret nerd. I'd done a little
bit of web design here and there. It literally started out with him just asking me to build
a website for his business, for his gym. Again, kind of a cultural thing in the fire department.
If you have a skill, you help the other guys and that's just what you do. We sat down and
made a website. It was exceptionally mediocre because I wasn't the world's most prolific
web designer but it got him started, gave him what he needed, got the gym off to a good
start and did a couple other jobs for some of his peers in the gym space.
It was interesting. If you assess personality types, I'm more of like an implementer where
I can take an idea and break it down into actionable steps and need to actually make
it a reality. I think part of the reason why Jake and I have a really good working relationship
is because he is much more like the idea guy. We're like, hey, we can do all this stuff
and he'll inspire me to go build a plan and we'll meet somewhere in the middle.
I remember this like it was yesterday. He hit me up and he's like, hey, dude, I need
some changes on my website. He's actually sitting here next to me laughing right now
and telling the story. We went and had coffee one morning after we got off working at a
fire department and that conversation transformed in this entire like and there's probably people
out there who can relate to this. We made before we got out from having coffee the most
ridiculously complex business plan in the world. If there was something to be done that
remotely pertain to a gym, we were going to do it. We were going to start this business.
We were going to do web design. We're going to do business mentoring, marketing automation
and copywriting and on like e-learning courses. It's just two guys who'd never run an online
business before. It sounds like a great plan. We had a super complex plan and we were going
to do all this stuff. We were both pretty fired up after that conversation, but then
we actually tried to figure out how to take action on it. He went from his world and the
idea to my world in the plan and realized that you just can't do it that way. You can't
go from nothing to everything in a month. It's just not real. We were pretty naive early
on. From there, we distilled it down and tried to find the blue ocean, find the void in the
market. We looked at those four different things we wanted to do like web design. I
wasn't that great at it and there was a lot of people who were way better. There's that.
The business mentorship was the same thing. Jake ran a really successful gym, but there
were some outstanding business mentors already in the space. Then the one that we actually
settled on where the market opportunity was marketing automation because there were tools
out there for creators. For people who are small business owners, if you want to legitimately
implement a fully featured marketing automation solution, you have to do a lot of stuff. You
have to know how to market. You have to know how to write copy. You have to know how to
build a funnel. You have to know how to essentially program. Even if you're not writing code,
you're still setting up Boolean logic and campaign builders and all this stuff that
your normal gym owner has no time or interest in getting involved in. That was how we settled
on the direction of tackling the marketing automation problem and we built on all the
other stuff.
The story of you guys meeting in a coffee shop and drawing up all these grand unrealistic
plans for all the stuff we're going to build is so familiar to me because I did the same
thing when I was younger. I remember before I really knew how to build a web app, I met
this guy, he was a developer and I really wanted to start a company together and I drew
up so many features with no real conception of how long it would take to actually build
them.
I'm glad I'm not alone.
You're definitely not alone there. More to the point, I think this process of being at
a place where you have a million and one things you want to do, you have the super ambitious
vision and you have to whittle it down and focus on just one thing that's going to work,
that's really hard to do. Most people can never successfully accomplish that. How did
you decide that marketing automation is where you wanted to focus your efforts?
We knew that we wanted to implement it for Jake's gym. That's obviously where we started.
I always joke around and call his gym the Petri dish because it's where he grew up,
grew all our ideas. We implemented some basic marketing automation strategies for his gym
and had some success there. It was honestly just a little bit of casual market research
where we started to see what was out there and what was cost effective for people and
we didn't really find a whole lot if they didn't want to build it themselves.
And further, we didn't find – and this is the interesting part – we didn't find
any software that would allow someone to do what we wanted to do. I didn't set out
to become a software company. That's the thing. I've been dragged into the software
game kicking and screaming. Now I love it. Can't have it back. It was a reluctant entrance
into building software because I really just wanted to work marketing strategy and use
tools that already existed to build strategies that worked and deploy them to gyms and monetize
it and have a nice little thing that I would do on my days off in the fire department.
We figured out that marketing automation was a void in the market, but then furthermore,
the first real hurdle that we had was that none of the tools that were out there, none
of these creator tools were built to scale the same marketing strategies over and over
and over again. You had to go through the same setup process every single step.
For every single client, in our case, every single gym. We had a guy who was working with
us who's literally following a 250-step checklist at one point to implement every new account
that we got because we started out building this on other people's software. It's
just kind of painful. That was what led us to build our own.
When you talk about validating the idea, there is an important part that I skipped over that
I think is worth talking about. We linked up with a business mentor. His name is Chris
Cooper. He runs a company called Two Brain Business. Probably, in my opinion, the best
micro gym business mentor in the space. He brought Jake on his podcast very, very early
on when he first started it. We just ran like a little baby automation where we were literally
just giving away content for free. Then we were like, hey, we'll build this automation
for you for like $100. That was our first market test.
I think if you're trying to distill this long-winded story into lessons, make sure people are willing
to give you their credit card as early as possible. Everyone will tell you they love
your idea because no one wants to be mean inherently. They won't give you your credit
card. They don't really like your idea or it's not really valuable.
We started with that offer and we sold 10 of them. I was like, that's cool, but it's
like a manual process. Then we sold 20 of them and then we sold 60 of them. I was like,
I have no idea how the hell I'm going to pull this off because it was just like this super
arduous process to build. It was a little hectic, but we got it done. What we did along
with that was we pre-sold subscriptions to this bigger software that was going to help
people manage marketing automation for their whole gym. It didn't really exist yet, but
that didn't stop us. We just pre-sold it to, again, validate the idea.
We pre-sold 60 subscriptions at $150 a month. We didn't actually build them. We just pre-authorized
their card, but we used it as validation because there's a difference, again, between someone
saying, yeah, I'd buy this other thing or I'm going to put my credit card down and actually
commit to it. We tried to do some market validation with actual purchase behavior pretty early
on in the process. I say that now and it sounds really smart, but really we didn't know what
the hell we were doing. We were just trying to make sure people would buy our stuff. That's
kind of how we settled when we validated it through a couple of different hurdles and
then we went and made it.
I got a ton of questions about everything that you just said.
Let it on me. Let's do it.
First up, I know nothing about gyms. I know nothing about how people with gyms market
their businesses and find new customers. Can you walk us through a little bit of the process
that a gym owner might go through or that you were walking people through in these early
days to help them market their business?
Yeah, absolutely. There are a couple of different core models. Again, these don't really apply
to what we call big box gyms like goals and anytime fitness. We really focus more on this
micro gym, CrossFit-esque type model where you're doing either personal training or small
group classes that are led by a coach. Your big box gyms, they make money off you. Not
showing up is really the story at the end of the day.
For these smaller independently owned and operated shops, there's really a couple of
key ways that people will come in. Earlier on in the micro gym industry, a lot of people
would just start out by doing a free class or a free week. That was when CrossFit and
things like CrossFit were more of a grassroots movement. Then as the industry has matured
and become more mainstream, I would say that the most generally accepted way that people
will get a new person in the door is by doing something called either a free consultation
– a lot of people call it a no sweat intro – where it's really a consultative process.
If you were to do a price comparison between a membership at Gold's might be 30 or 40
or 50 bucks a month and a membership at CrossFit Gym might be $150 a month. The difference
there is the coaching and the personal attention and the experience that you get. We find that
in our spaces that the highest performing gyms are the ones that take a very consultative
approach to this. The first step that a lot of these gyms do is this one-on-one consultation.
They might sit you down and say, hey, Colin, what's your experience in fitness? What's
your goal? Why are you here? What brings you in? Then they'll be able to actually recommend
one of their services or a combination of services that will help you achieve your goal.
That's the model that we really, really support and put our name behind because I think it's
the one that kind of professionalizes the industry the most and yields the strongest
relationship with the new member.
As far as top of funnel activities, people will do Facebook ads, brand awareness. They'll
run referral campaigns with their current members. Some people will do cold traffic
and do six-week challenges, which they'll go through a fitness challenge, which then
convert those people into an ongoing membership. There's a few different permutations of approach
that people have. Our software kind of supports all of them, but we put an extra focus on
that consultative approach for someone coming in.
You talk about not wanting to be a software business at first and sort of being pulled
that way against your will. Does that mean that your initial plan was that you guys wanted
to be sort of a consulting shop and walk customers through their problems by hand?
We were building on software that was already out there. We absolutely wanted to take more
of a consultative approach because to me at that point, building software was just like
this black box and I didn't really know how anything worked. Some days it still feels
like that, honestly.
We started out building on other people's software and it was just kind of like a square
peg ground hole scenario where there were a couple of factors at play. Either we weren't
using the software the way it was intended to be used, so we were running into issues
there or if we found software that – at one point we found some software that a company
was developing that was supposed to work exactly where we needed it, but they were trying to
hit a lot of different industries at once and so the things that we needed in their
roadmap to allow us to be successful didn't always rise to the top.
Again, you heard me talk earlier about leadership and accountability. We talk about accountability
in our company a lot. Anytime there's an issue that affects a customer, I will personally
own the issue to the customer and they'll even do it publicly in our user group because
that's just how I run a company.
That was before we started writing software where these third-party platforms, even if
it wasn't our fault, the customers are still paying us, so it's still our fault even
if there's nothing we can do about it. We kept having a lot of issues. It got to the
point where I looked at Jake and I was like, hey man, if we're going to look bad, I at
least want it to be my fault for real. I don't know if I can do better, but it's not going
that great right now, so I want to try. That was literally the inflection point. It was
out of frustration, but one of these companies that we had worked with beforehand, they asked
us when they were vetting us to work with them, they were like, do you want to go be
a software company? Are you going to work with us for a little while and then go build
your own software?
I remember this like it was yesterday. I told the guy, I said, I do not want to become
a software company, but I believe in what we're doing and I will become a software
company if I have to. I'd rather not. Now, looking back, I'm incredibly happy and grateful
that we did because it's just allowing us to do things that are in the best interest
of our customers directly that nobody else is going to care about them as much as we
do. It all worked out well.
You ended up going to a coding bootcamp. When did that happen? How did it go? Do you recommend
that experience to others?
Yeah, I had a great experience. I went through a bootcamp called the Firehose Project. I
did not pick it because of the name, I promise, but there was a specific reason I picked it.
I'm a very strong believer in anything I do in mentorship. That has been since a very
young age and early in my career. In the fire department, there were always mentors and
guys that would teach me as a young firefighter and guys that I would look up to. I wanted
to try to emulate that experience with my education. I finished high school, but I didn't
love it. I made it through a year of college and bailed. I'm not a big old school guy just
to say it bluntly. Again, to me, I'm a people person. I needed that one-on-one interaction
in order to really engage.
Firehose Project provided one-on-one mentorship with their program. That was the hook that
made me think that theirs was a good idea above anyone else. That was right around the
inception of when we officially bailed on the consultative approach. We had 15 or so
gyms that were still with us from our foray into this on other people's software. We just
had them maintaining. We spent six or seven months building an MVP. It started out very
purpose-driven. I'm an OBS dude. I always got right to the point. Before I even enrolled
in the boot camp, I talked to the CEO, Marco. I asked him. I was like, look, I'm here specifically
for this one reason because I need to build software to run this company. I'm not trying
to do 100 to-do list apps. I need to find some stuff that's going to let me do exactly
what I need to do. Are you down with that? He's like, yeah. For my capstone project,
I could just work on my own thing. He's like, yep, you're good. It was cool because he let
me just align. I learned the basics, but the thing that happened in there that was much
more transformative than me learning to be a software engineer. I don't want to insult
other software engineers by throwing that word around, but I met the guy who would eventually
– he's essentially a co-founder and our CTO in that boot camp. We had a little office
hour sessions and I was working on something that was kicking my butt. I was like, hey,
I got some interesting stuff here. If anybody wants to come check it out with me. He hit
me up and he's like, what do you got going on? That was it, man. He dove in and we just
worked and worked and worked. It was just this incredible working relationship and we
just started building. That dude walked the dog on me on software engineering, which is
great. This is exactly what I needed. That's how the software took shape is from that relationship
that started in that code school.
That sounds so great because so many would-be founders are stuck in this place where they're
not sure if they should learn to code. They're not sure if they'll be able to find time
to do that. You had a boot camp that was like, hey, you can do your startup and learn to
code and work on your startup as part of learning how to code. It sort of fit perfectly into
what you're doing.
Yeah. I'll tell you, man, I don't do a lot of coding now. It's really just because
everybody I've been able to hire is just way better at it than me, which is obviously
the goal. But in the context of a founder who's considering whether or not they should
learn to code, if that's a blocker, go do it if you can. If you have the aptitude and
you have the means to go do it, just the momentum that we were able to gain off of an extremely
basic MVP that I coded, I don't know, at least probably 40% of with Matt doing all the hard
stuff.
The momentum we were able to gain off of that was incredible. Now half the code in the software
is way out of my league because Matt and another guy, Jake, who we just brought on, different
Jake, that's their focus. They're incredible at it. But especially in the formative months
of just trying to get something out there to validate your idea, like, oh my gosh, learning
to code was just incredible because it let me move so much faster to just get the idea
out there and bring it to life.
You talk about not enjoying high school, about dropping out of college after a year. But
then on the other hand, you're talking to me about top of funnel marketing analysis,
validating your idea, learning how to code. What changed? How did you become such an effective
learner?
Pertinence to my life goals. Seriously, like, that's that's all it is. It's not that I don't
enjoy learning. I have a constant thirst for learning that I am unable to turn off. It's
like the snotty little kid in algebra class. What am I ever going to use this? Like that
was me, man. And there's definitely some stuff where you don't think you're going to use
it.
When we learned all the different algorithms in code school about flipping all the zeros
to ones to make a picture and stuff like that, I was like, yeah, whatever. But then we built
a scheduling app and talk about having to figure out how to algorithmically calculate
availability slots for booking appointments and stuff, it all became clear.
But I'm just the kind of person where if I can't see the light at the end of the tunnel,
I'm out. I'll just go find a different tunnel. It's just I don't have the attention span
for like, I'm going to do two years of general education because someone says I'm supposed
to and then I'll go learn the stuff that I care about. I don't have the attention span
for it. So it's really what it came down to is I wanted to build a business. The appeal
to me of a bootcamp is that you can go learn just what you want to learn. You don't have
to take an English class to go learn JavaScript. You just go learn JavaScript. So that's the
difference for me.
That was always the most frustrating part of school for me too, taking all these classes
that I didn't want to take that I didn't care that much about. I mean, I was considering
dropping out of college after my junior year because I figured I had all the skills to
get a job. I'd already worked an internship and was getting paid. Why did I need to learn
this other stuff?
Right. Yeah, totally.
So you learned how to code. You contributed a lot to this initial product, this MVP that
you guys built that helps you guys gain a lot of momentum in the early days. I want
to discuss what this momentum looked like and how you found your first customers. You
talked about doing a podcast promo early on. Was that your first foray into getting customers
to actually pay for what you guys were building?
Yeah, absolutely it was. So those were the first dollars that we ever collected was selling
that one little automation through the podcast and the pre-sales that came along with it.
And man, it's interesting. There were just so many tweaks and iterations to the business
model. So many, I don't know, hard lessons. I could stay on there for hours and paint
a picture of all the different lessons that we learned the hard way. But yeah, initially
it was just word of mouth. I think the advantage of really having a narrow focus to begin with
as far as your market goes, having a niche or whatnot, is that you look at the CrossFit
market. That's our beachhead market. There's like 12,000 of them. And it's a pretty finite
market opportunity when you think about it.
And yeah, we're not going to stay restricted to that market forever. But when you're trying
to start, it's like the old saying, if you're selling to everybody, you're not selling to
somebody. You've got to be able to provide that authentic product. And people are buying
from you as a person at the end of the day, not like, yeah, your product has to not suck
and your business has to be solvent. But at the end of the day, if they get on a phone
call and think you're full of it, you're not making the sale.
And so I think just Jake being a successful gym owner in that space and being able to
run these sales calls very early on and relate to the exact problems that both he and the
customer were having at the same time, where it spread pretty quickly about the solution
that we had. But it definitely has not been up and to the right the whole time. We went
up and to the right for a little bit and literally plateaued for like a year before we made some
changes. Hasn't all been smooth.
Tell me about that plateau. Where were you guys at in terms of revenue when you hit it?
And what was it like trying to figure out how to get out of that funk?
Yeah, so the biggest issue was our business model in general. Small issue, right?
So what we tried to do is like initially we had this consultative approach and we were
just doing the stuff for gyms and we're cool. And then once we made the pivot and said, hey,
we're going to become a software company, like we wanted to build this platform because
it's an easy lift when you look at it skin deep, right? Where you're like, oh, well,
this works for gyms. It could work for other businesses. It could work for chiropractors.
It could work for yoga studios. It could work for this. It could work for that.
And so kind of the same mistake we made at the coffee shop where we just decided we're
going to go do all this stuff. We were going to essentially try to bootstrap our way into
a straight up marketplace play, right? So two sided marketplace. We're going to go find
partners to be the subject matter experts the way we were with the CrossFit stuff. And
then those partners are going to go do all the sales and we'll set up revenue share agreements
and like, we built this beautiful plan on paper that felt great. And we even went so
far we brought on a partner to replace what we were doing with CrossFit. And he's still
part of our team. Even though that whole partner model has been put to bed, put out to pasture.
But like, so we brought a guy named Mike who another really successful gym owner, really
strong marketing background, NBA, like super solid guy, and basically brought him in as
the partner. He was our essentially test to like get a first partner up and running. But
the success of that business model hinged on us doing that like 10 more times. And we
successfully did it zero more times. And so we, as far as the MRR plateau, we were plateaued
right around, I think 18, but we were on a revenue split. So more like 10. And we sat
there and sat there and sat there. And so, you know, again, going back to the value of
like mentorship and having people who are more experienced than you to be a sounding
board. You know, someone guy we met during this experience, a guy named Kevin Kirkland
actually runs a startup called Sunny. It's like a personal CRM, which is super cool.
But you know, he's always been a great sounding board for us. And I kind of hit him up and
he had some familiarity with our approach. And I was like, man, like, we're pounding
the pavement, we're going all these conferences, we're like having all these meetings. And
it was exactly what I mentioned before, Courtland, we're like, everyone's like, yeah, I love
what you're doing. But nobody had the follow through to get up to speed and work with us
to ship a product and become the channel partner. And Kevin broke it down real simple. He said,
Matt, how long have you been trying? And I said, four and a half months. He had great
experience. In a startup, four and a half months is an eternity. Try something else
tomorrow. And I was like, Oh, fine. Like break it down like that. It's pretty simple. And
he couldn't have been any more correct. And so, so it was a hard pivot. I mean, we, we
essentially went to our partner, who we brought in in the crossword space, acquired his company,
brought him in to head up customer success, brought everything back under one roof, trimmed
all the fat off the stake, and said, we're going to go back to doing what we know we're
good at, which is helping gym owners build better businesses and deliver world class
client experience. And we had the subject matter expertise in house, brought everything back in,
Jake went back to doing sales, just like he did in the old days, except now we were doing
it on our own software platform. And that's when things stopped plateauing and started growing.
That's fascinating. So you're basically working on a winning business strategy,
you got excited about something that had maybe more potential, but couldn't make it work.
And then you went back to what you're doing at first that was growing. And
that's where you are today. Yep, you got it, man.
Let's talk about this first phase, because before you even got stuck, you were making,
you said 10 or 18k monthly revenue, which is no small feat, especially in the time frame that
you did in it. What were some of the most important things you guys did to grow your
revenue that much so quickly? At risk of sounding like a cliche,
everything that doesn't scale now to be specific, it's all about relationships, right? I mean,
we preach relationships with our software, but relationships with your early customers
is crucial. Speaking to them, listening to them, talking with them frequently.
We leverage our Facebook user group very, very frequently to do everything from
live feeds and delivering good information to just calling people up and talking to them.
But I think getting customers involved in your journey as a company and the evolution of the
software, actually asking them what they think and listening to them and making sure that you're
solving their problem and having the relationship was key. Because to put it bluntly, they put up
with a lot of you-know-what from us early on, because we were literally figuring out how to
be a software company. And we never gave it away free. Our price was lower, but we always charged
for it because it's something I believe in. If they're not going to give you money, then
the value prop isn't compelling. So they definitely tolerate it a lot. We have a few of those like,
I was joking, call them the up-launch OGs. But I mean, they're still with us and they're
incredible brand advocates, but we wouldn't be here without those guys. And so I think having
really strong personal relationships with your early adopters, I can't overstate the importance
of that. That's what kept us alive. It's so tempting, especially for a lot of
software engineers to want to build a business and start selling it and never talk to anybody.
And so people build these marketing first businesses where they never really talk to the
customers. They don't get to know them and wonder why no one is using their sort of half-baked early
product. It sounds like you guys had a much more high-touch sales-based approach. I got a couple
questions about that. Number one, what was your business model in terms of how much you were
charging these early customers? And number two, what are some challenges that you encountered
while doing all these sales that you learned how to ever come?
Yeah, definitely. So in our earliest iteration, we were charging $150 a month.
That was when we were still doing it all ourselves on other people's software.
And we eventually bumped it up to 200. We weren't really getting too many price
objections at that price point. The value prop of our software is it replaces a number of other
SaaS subscriptions that a typical gym owner is using and then saves them a bunch of time on top
of it. So there's a pretty decent comparison we can do there. And then once we went to the
partner-based approach, we bumped it up to 300. Honestly, it was just straight unit economics.
If we were going to be on the rev share, we had to make enough to live for the company to live,
not even for us to live. We were basically working for free at that point, which is fine.
So the price kind of kept coming up and up and up. It's settled at 300. That's where it lives
right now. It hasn't moved since. And I think as far as challenges with that process,
I think the biggest part is, especially if you don't have good alignment between your story and
the pain of your customers, if you're not really able to well articulate the pain point that you're
solving for, it's tough to make the sale, especially if you're not proven. Like I said,
we pre-sold 60 before it even existed. It was literally Jake having a conversation about like,
here's the stuff that makes my head hurt about my gym. Does your head hurt too? Yes. Okay, great.
We're going to go build this thing. And so really just being able to relate to the pain. We're part
of a mentoring group called SAS Academy with a guy named Dan Martell. And a lot of it's just like
rock solid sales and marketing playbooks. And one of the biggest things he always pushes on us is
like your product has to be a painkiller, not a vitamin. You skip a day taking a vitamin,
you're going to be all right. You can skip a day taking a painkiller when you're in pain,
and you feel the pain and you go take your painkiller. And so I think just being able to
truly relate to whatever the customer has going on. And if you can't figure that out,
you might be building the wrong thing. It's real talk. You've got to be solving a legitimate
problem that someone's willing to trade their money in order to make the problem go away.
That's business that it's most fundamental.
I'm listening to you talk about how you learn from your mentors, how you learn from your customers.
And it just makes me think about all the people who haven't gotten started because they feel like
they have to learn a whole bunch of stuff before they take the first step. Here you are learning
all of the stuff on the job. What do you think were some of the more effective sources of learning
for you that gave you the most bang for your buck? There were a couple. I think the first phase,
because I don't want to just give someone advice they can't take action on. So I think it depends
on what stage in your business you're in. So the first phase of it was just by doing it,
just not overthinking it and doing it and understanding that you're probably going to
suck at whatever you're doing for a while and being too stubborn to fail.
We really talk a lot culturally in our business about failure is not an option.
And I don't mean that things like that get taken out of the context we use it in,
I think in tech in this industry right now. Because that doesn't mean it's one of these
super toxic work every weekend, like meet your metrics or you're fired. That couldn't be further
from the company around. We work very deliberately to build a calm company culture that's healthy for
people to work in. But on the way on this journey, going from part-time to full-time and a business
model that wasn't growing at all for almost a year, we had every opportunity to quit and didn't
because we believed in what we were doing. But when I say failure is not an option,
people misconstrue that. They think you're just going to keep doing the same thing over and over
and over again until it works. That couldn't be further from the truth. You just have to keep
trying different versions of what you believe in that are hopefully backed up by actual evidence
or conversations with real people until you figure out what's going to work.
So it's like micro failures power the high-level success at the end of the day.
To directly answer the question, the first thing was just the school of hard knocks.
We're going to try a bunch of different stuff and we're going to figure out what feels right
for our customers and for us and try to focus on that. Once we had a little bit of traction,
I'll tell you, joining that SaaS Academy group was massive for us. It was an investment. It's
not a free thing. It's not a casual weekend meetup. Dan, the guy who runs it, is a very
successful founder. He's three VC-backed companies, a couple of exits, super legit,
is an incredible instructor. So I joined that. And it was, I'll tell you, one of the times I've
been most proud of the team because we were still doing the partner thing at that point.
We were still broke as broken be. And I asked my team and everyone just throw in some cash so I
could go sign up for this thing. And every single person did it without blinking, which was amazing
and humbling for me as a leader. And so I signed up for that program. And we do three in-person
events per year. The first one was in Toronto two days after I signed up, just randomly. So I'm
like, all right, well, go take action, dude. Hopped on a plane and went. And it was like
getting punched in the face, Portland, honestly, because I was learning all these incredible
marketing strategies. And I realized that our business model was going to let me implement
precisely none of them because we were doing all the sales through these partners. And I'm like,
I'm looking around the room and I say, all right, I am the lowest paid person in this room,
both at an individual level and at a company level. And I'm the only one doing things differently.
So there's probably one person in this room who's not being that smart right now. And it's probably
me. So that was just like a smack in the face with reality. And so that and the conversation
with Kevin that I mentioned earlier were like the two catalysts that happened in close proximity
to one another where I said, all right, I came home from Toronto. And I said, Jake,
we're changing the business model. I'm done. And he's like, all right, dude, I got you back.
Let's go. And that's when we talked with Mike and about all the businesses under one roof.
And we spent that entire period between that meetup and the one four months later,
literally rebuilding our business internally, figuring out what jobs everyone was going to do,
making a new website, proceduralizing and writing systems, and the whole nine yards.
And we didn't have a big jump in MRR during that period. We were still right around 20.
And then once everybody got settled in their roles, like September last year,
I don't know, all the puzzle pieces kind of clicked and just kind of started taking off.
Can you give me an example of one of the strategies that you learned
that you were able to implement with a Blanche and really turn things around?
Sure. So I mean, gosh, like the most basic things like the partners in our old business
model were doing all of the sales. They owned the funnel. And we were just like the co-branded tech
implementers behind the scenes. So I mean, anything from content marketing strategies to
building an effective lead magnet to using that to fill a demo funnel. The only way I can implement
that stuff is if I took it and then retaught it to the partners and hoped that they would implement
it right. And Mike could have. The one partner that was successful with the problem is that
in that model, the partners world is very resource limited, right? Because they're essentially in that
model, those partners were generally solo partners who weren't making enough to hire somebody else
to help them. But if we went in and did all this stuff for them, then it was so much work and effort
and time that the revenue share stopped making sense. So it's kind of like neither party was
properly resourced to take action on any of this stuff. And so from our standpoint, without any
visibility into the funnel, without any visibility into the demo process, without any visibility to
customer support, all of those things were on the partner. And so yeah, that's a beautiful
example. Dan has a killer framework for building the lead magnet. And that's great, but we weren't
doing the selling. So what am I building lead magnet for? And so it's one basic example of
all these different things. At the end of the day, the catalyst was like, I need to own the funnel.
I need to be able to drive deal flow in our business and be able to make these tweaks and
pull these levers to make it more efficient. You're coming into this whole startup tech world
as kind of an outsider. You obviously did not get a computer science degree.
You were not reading about startups in tech your entire life. I think that gives you a fresh
perspective that others who are more like me might not have. What are some things that you believe
that others and the startup team don't? That is an outstanding question. Man,
there's so much. I think that growth is interesting. Let's talk about growth. You look at a lot of
companies that take money, that go the traditional VC route. And don't be wrong, venture capital
builds great businesses. There's probably also a lot of them that are crash and burn along the way
on that route. I think that that's interesting from the standpoint of as an outsider,
I take you way back in my roots as a firefighter. A guy works a side job, starts a painting business,
has two or three guys painting for him. He's making some decent money. That's solid. That's
a cool business. I don't know many VCs that are going to go fund a couple of painters, but the
point is success can look like a lot of different things depending on the lens that you're viewing
it through. For us, the way I look at up launch, a more deliberate growth strategy makes sense to
me. If you compare what we do to other marketing automation tools, they're just that. They're tools,
essentially, commodities. We're like they're a blank slate and you can go build a strategy
for pest control or chiropractors or yoga studios or infomarketers or whatever. Our differentiator
in our market is that we go deeper because we have subject matter expertise on staff. We
provide a true end-to-end solution. The growth at all costs approach may not work for us because
it's tough to scale that type of depth in 15 more verticals simultaneously. Because what would
happen is the product wouldn't go as deep. It wouldn't be the true end-to-end solution. Then
we'd be in a feature war with 100 million dollar companies building the next widget.
For us, I try to take a more deliberate approach on I want to go demolish this market, beachhead
market. Maybe we take some money, maybe we don't. Even if we don't, this market will fund the next
one where I can go hire the right person to make sure we can go equally as deep on the next market
and so on and so forth. Maybe we only work in five or six or 10 verticals down the road and there's
100 other ones that we ignore, but we'll dominate those 10. That's not a traditional growth strategy.
It's one that made sense to me in isolation, but when I compare that to companies that go the
traditional venture route and it's like growth at all costs, go get a Series A and triple your staff,
it's just a different mindset. That was one thing that I think might be an anti-pattern or
a contrarian viewpoint. I don't know. It wasn't even on my radar until I started thinking about
raising money and then realized some of the cultural stuff that comes along with it.
That is not at all a common viewpoint among the founders of stereotypical high-growth Silicon
Valley startups. What are some things you think the typical tech company could stand to learn
from a company of firemen? Because I assume you guys have a totally different way of organizing
yourselves, a different culture, different norms, etc.
I was hoping you'd ask something like that. There's a lot out there in the tech world today
specifically, and I think a lot of the conversations that are going on right now
need to happen around workplace culture and around treating people from different backgrounds with
respect. Gosh, I like so many different things. Jake and I work very, very deliberately on taking
all the best parts of the culture of the fire department and making sure that our company
embodies them in the tech world. I think that there's a lot.
What are those best parts?
Yeah, exactly. We have a pretty well-defined set of ethos, and not all of them for up-launch. Not
all of them come from the fire department, but some of the ones that do personal and team
accountability is a really, really big one for us. Like I mentioned, if we have a bug,
I'll call the customer and literally apologize to them for it. That doesn't make us unique.
There's other companies that do that. But the point is, even within our team,
when there's an issue, the way our culture is, everyone rushes to own it and say,
hey, it was my fault, or I could have done X and everyone rushes to fix it. It's never
the flip of that, which is, oh, well, that's Cortland's job. Cortland works in product.
I'm over here in engineering. He wrote a bad spec, so sorry, dude, I just built what he told me.
There's companies where that's a real conversation, and that doesn't exist in our world. The dedication
to supporting each other is massive. In the fire department, if a guy in your firehouse
needs to move, you don't hire movers. You get 12 firemen to come over and have a pizza and drink a
beer and carry your bookcases, and you just help each other. We try to bring that supportive
environment in as best we can and make sure that we're all here for each other in whatever way
possible. The other side of this is there were some things about the fire department culture
that we didn't want to bring over, like baseline 60-hour work weeks and being away from your family
for a third of your life for 25 years at a time. We work very hard to run an outcome-driven
business, and have outcome-driven leadership styles and management styles. That way, it's
not about clocking in, where were you at 3 p.m., Cortland? Why wasn't your little light on slack
green? It looked great to me. I'm out. We got to treat people like adults, treat them
as the experts that they are, and we try to just hire the best people we can who have the – we
lead with trust and hopefully have the company's best interest at heart.
You've gone from reading a ton of startup advice,
trying to learn how to break into this world, to coming on the Indianapolis podcast and sharing
your story and your advice with other founders who look up to you. How does it feel to be on
the other side of things?
Crazy. I don't feel like I'm on the other side of things. There's a thing I like.
I just want to go learn from the next person. It's perpetual. But it is interesting to hear you say
that. I'm not good at stopping – what is it – stop to smell the flowers or whatever. This is not
really how I operate. It's a cool question to be asked. I've never considered that, to be perfectly
honest with you. Yeah, I guess it feels cool. Really, it's not to me about, oh, I'm on this
podcast. Look at me. If there's someone out there who thinks I can help, oh my gosh, hit me up.
There's so many dozens, if not hundreds of people who have helped me when they absolutely didn't
have to, didn't get anything from it. If I can pay that forward to somebody, I'm in. Let's do it.
You talk a lot about how other people play a role in your business. You talk a lot about happenstance,
happenstance with you becoming a fireman, with you becoming a startup founder. What do you think
in your journey is not luck? What do you think has been the most under your control?
Work ethic, hands down. I think that there are a lot of things in life that are not under our
control. I think the only thing that we can control in a lot of cases is the way that we
react to things that happen to us. Part of that reaction, I think, is how hard you work to change
the parts of your life you don't like. Without a doubt, I think everyone talks about, oh,
what's your one superpower? Mine is just grit, man. Jake and I talk about that frequently. I had
every chance to say, oh, this sucks. I'm going to go back to my secure job in the fire department
where I've got a pension and I'm going to go to work. It's all planned out. At the end of the
day, I don't think it's about being smarter than everyone around you because I'm not. I think it's
about working harder than everyone around you, which I try really hard to do. That's my answer
right there. I'm a big believer in optimism. I think that optimism is a self-fulfilling prophecy.
If you believe that you can do it and you think things are going to work, then you're not going
to quit. You're obviously a very optimistic, self-confident guy. Where does that come from?
How does someone build up that self-confidence? Man, I wish I knew.
It's funny because outwardly, my wife says to me all the time, she's like,
here's this extrovert. I'm like, no, I don't feel like one at all. I don't at all.
It's the same thing with confidence. Yeah, I'm confident in the sense that
we have a direction, we've made some decisions, but I think it doesn't mean that I'm confident
to a fault. I think that, especially lately, there's been a lot of things that keep me up
at night or that I think about the business where we're making the right decision. Is the product
heading the right way? There's a million scenarios, man, where I can picture up-launch crashing and
burning tomorrow. There's two or three where I'm like, oh, yeah, we're rock stars. That's every
business in every stage is the reality. I have naturally pessimistic internal monologues,
but I just try to keep them there as internal monologues because that doesn't benefit everyone.
I agree with you wholeheartedly. Optimism is a self-fulfilling prophecy and especially
leading a team. I can't get on a weekly call with 10 coworkers and be like, oh, here's the 17
different doomsday scenarios that I stayed up all night last night thinking about. How do you guys
feel about those? It doesn't exactly inspire confidence. At the end of the day, I define
the fire department as making permanent decisions based on incomplete data sets.
Guess what? It's the same thing in a startup. You don't have all the facts, but you have to make
decisions, some of them permanent decisions. You just have to make the best decision you can and
go with it. I think that's just what happens. You just can't be scared to make a decision
because I think people will just generally perseverate over them too much and sometimes
the opportunity can pass you by. Speaking of making permanent decisions with incomplete data
sets, I know a lot of people who have seemingly every advantage in the book. They are career
software developers. They read a lot about startups. They essentially have all the skills
they need to have a real shot at starting something of their own. They're really interested
in doing so, but they don't because taking that initial leap is scary. What if you fail? What if
it doesn't work out? What's your advice for how people can get over that hump and get started?
It's a good question, Coraline. I don't know that there's one answer that'll fit everybody.
I don't know. I don't want to sound like a Nike shoe commercial, but like,
just go do it. Just try it. I think it's the biggest thing. I think that it's important to
realize too that there's different degrees of doing it. It doesn't mean that I'm going to go
quit my job and go move into a closet in San Francisco that costs me 10 grand a month and
live with seven of my friends and go do all this stuff and whatever. You don't have to go from zero
to that. You can just try some things and try to validate some ideas. At the end of the day,
I feel like it's a relatively simple formula. I love to listen to this in five years and see if
I still agree with myself. But at the end of the day, if you have a market of a suitable size and
a decent percentage of those people who are willing to give you money to solve their problem
and you think you can actually solve it, then generally you have a business. You can validate
that hypothesis without setting your whole life on fire. Once you have a reasonable degree of
confidence, yeah, there's still going to be a little bit of a gut check moment, but you just
got to jump in and go for it or else you'll never know. I guess the other thing just to real talk
is even if people have every advantage, not everyone's cut out for this. There are a lot
of things that I worry about a lot, especially since we really had a team and there are people
who depend on my decision making to be able to feed their kids. It's weight, man. It's real
weight. The other reality is that even if everyone, like the smartest guy with the smartest degree
and all the experience, those 10 programming languages and MBA, you look great on paper,
but some people just don't know the personalities that are able to handle that.
That's just a reality. If you're that person that can't hang with that kind of weight, then
maybe you don't start a business. Well, you, Matt, are definitely that type of person.
I've enjoyed having you on the podcast, getting to know your story. I really think it'll inspire
a lot of people who are wondering if they come from the right sort of background to start a
startup. The answer is it doesn't really matter. As long as you put the work in, you can get there.
Can you let listeners know where they can go to learn more about what you're up to at uplaunch
and also what's going on in your personal life as well if you share that sort of thing online?
Yeah, absolutely. That is a 2019 goal for me is to become more transparent,
especially with a company, but also just really in general. I haven't really taken good action
on it yet, so hopefully by the time this podcast comes out, maybe I'll have gotten my act together.
For the business, we're just at uplaunch.com. Super easy. You can get me on Twitter at Matt
Verlack, V-E-R-L-A-Q-E. It's a really weird last name. I have to figure out how to spell that one,
but I am active on there and Matt at uplaunch.com. Someone wants to drop an email. That's it. I'm
wide open, so if there's anything I can answer for anybody or anybody that can help in any possible
way, you got my wheels turning in Portland when you asked me that question earlier. If there's
anything I can do for anyone to pay it forward, please don't hesitate to hit me up. It's not an
idle statement. I truly mean it. All right. Thanks so much, Matt, for offering all your help and
sharing your time. Yeah, thank you so much, Portland.
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rather than trying to build your business all by yourself. So you'll see me on the forum for sure,
as well as more than a handful of some of the guests that I've had on the podcast. If you're
looking for inspiration, we've also got a huge directory full of hundreds of products built by
other indie hackers, every one of which includes revenue numbers and some of the behind the scenes
strategies for how they grew their products from nothing. As always, thanks so much for listening
and I'll see you next time.