Episode Transcript
Speaker 0 00:08 Welcome to the rogue startups podcast where two startup founders are sharing lessons learned and pitfalls to avoid in their online businesses. And now here's Dave and Craig.
Speaker 1 00:19 All right, welcome back to another episode of rogue startups. Uh, Dave is off this week and I am happy to have on a friend and fellow kind of bootstrapper in the SAS world. Andy Baldacci. Andy, how are you doing?
Speaker 2 00:31 Good. How are you Craig? Excited it to do this.
Speaker 1 00:34 Yeah, for sure. For sure. We a, you know, it's nice we caught up kind of a off the record or off air a couple of months ago and had a really nice chat that I, I, I think about a lot and really enjoyed, um, all around kind of marketing and marketing hires and stuff like that. And so when the opportunity came up to get you on the show, I was like, this is great because I've been listening to the podcast a lot lately, your podcast and we'd love to, you know, looking forward to the kind of catching up.
Speaker 2 00:59 Yeah, it's always good when, when people that I like to catch up with also have a podcast because then we can kind of make it easier to find time because it kind of kills a few birds with one stone.
Speaker 1 01:09 Yeah, yeah, for sure. For sure. So Andy, for folks who don't know, kind of who you are or what you've been up to recently, do you want to give kind of the short version of, of kind of who you are and what you're up to?
Speaker 2 01:20 Yeah, so I guess the short version is I, my name's Andy Baldacci. I live kind of in the middle of nowhere, Texas right now. I'm not by choice, but that's a long story. Uh, my background is I was a professional poker player for almost a decade and then made the very obvious transition from poker into SAS marketing, kind of cut my teeth in the space a bit, worked up, uh, with a few clients and then kind of built a little bit of a consultancy there and worked with Hubstaff, uh, for a while as their head of marketing, I think was the official title. But from that point on, I kind of got into the podcasting space, which is how you and I connected. And one thing led to another and, uh, left consulting behind to join groove full time, um, as their first marketing hire and was there for about 18 months and left that behind when I acquired a small SAS company with a few partners of mine. So it's kind of been all over the place. I'm sure I did a pretty horrible job of connecting the dots, but that's kind of the, the bullet points of it.
Speaker 1 02:36 Cool. No, I think it'll, I think we'll jump into each of those a little bit as, as, as we go along. So, so Sabre SEM is the name of your new SAS business. Um, what, uh, what do you guys do?
Speaker 2 02:49 So the simple way of putting it is just we help people make better lineups in less time for daily fantasy sports sites like DraftKings and FanDuel. Um, it's a space where it really blew up probably five years ago when the two main companies spent nearly three quarters of $1 billion on advertising in the U S um, and it's kind of what a lot of people see as like the second poker boom where there's just a lot of money to be made, a lot of people playing it, but the tools kind of supporting those players have been lacking. And at saver SIM we kind of try to simplify things by doing a lot of the number crunching and heavy lifting behind the scenes so that the players don't have to do that.
Speaker 1 03:33 Mm. I know like, uh, right out of college and grad school, I had a fantasy league fantasy football league with some friends and it was just impossible to stay up with it all the time to stay current with, you know, who's heard are they going to play? Do I need to adjust my line up? Like all this kind of stuff. It's just next to impossible. And we weren't, I mean we had like $100 a person a year on the line. I know some of these guys play for a really big box, right?
Speaker 2 03:59 Yeah. So I mean, so my partners on the, on the deal <inaudible> probably some of the highest volume players in the space. And so like on Sunday, I think he had maybe $150,000 wagered in contests. Um, but, but yeah, the, the real appeal to daily fantasy sports outside of just the, the money that can be made is that you don't have to, it's not like you draft a team once and then you're stuck with it and you have to figure out these trades and all this other thing and make your lineup every week. The daily fantasy sports, it's basically you drafted a new team for football every week or for baseball every day, but you don't have to play every day. It's kind of individual contest and you just play when you want to. And it just is a much more flexible approach than kind of the traditional season long fantasy sports.
Speaker 1 04:51 Cool. Cool. So you mentioned you acquired the company. What, uh, like what kind of stage was it at when you guys bought it? Uh, in terms of like number of customers or revenue or whatever kind of metric you want to share and then like kind of where are you guys now and how long has that been?
Speaker 2 05:05 Yeah, so when we audit, the way we structured it is we bought 100% of the company, our giving a chunk back to the founder over two years to kind of incentivize him to stick around because we really wanted to partner with him to grow this cause we knew he, no he adds a lot to the business. But basically it started out as a side project for him. This is how he really learned to program and his passion was always baseball and so he kinda just got into modeling the game and just slowly built out this product, sorry, sharing with other people. Started charging money over the years and got it to the point where probably could have left his job behind, but it would have been a little tight and he's bit more risk averse than me and my partner. So he was doing this on the side, had a few very part time people kind of helping out.
Speaker 2 05:57 Um, and they were probably high five figures, low six figures, MRR. Um, but the server costs are very high. Uh, just because what we do is computationally very resource intensive. So there wasn't as much margin there as in many other SAS businesses. So there wasn't quite able to go full time. So a lot of the appeal to a deal for him was one, it would give him a very good cushion financially that he didn't really have before. So there's some nice cash in the bank there, but it also, we guaranteed them a salary and really made it clear that we wanted to partner with him and grow this with him. And so it kind of de-risked a lot of kind of the startup journey for him while still giving him a good chunk of upside. And so we, the deal came about really quickly. I wasn't looking specifically to buy a company, I was interested in it, but I had been, I've always been working on gambling projects on the side, even when I was doing consulting. And so with a couple of my partners we were getting into sports betting you needed some more data. I figured these guys had the data if they didn't publicly publish it. So I talking to them, realize they were really small and then kind of talked it about investing and then acquiring and it all came together over about a month or so. And we finalized the deal in December, 2018 and then I went full time February, 2019 I had to kind of transition out of the role at groove over time. But that's kind of the timeline for things.
Speaker 1 07:30 Cool. Cool. And you said like a high five figures,
Speaker 2 07:35 MRR or ARR? ARR. Um, so it was, it's a very seasonal business where there are going to be a huge spike in customers at the start of every baseball season, a smaller spike for football, basketball, and then kind of non-existent for hockey. And then after the spikes, it kind of would trend downward. You'd have the spike. And so at the peak it was definitely a six figure AR business if you kind of extrapolated out the, the high points. But when you kind of broke down the actual a cashflow coming in, it was a bit a little bit lower than that. Mm.
Speaker 1 08:15 So I, uh, and again, like I love having a podcast cause I get to ask all the really selfish questions that I just want the answer to. And I hope everyone else finds, finds a lot of this interesting too. But this is, uh, so I've never had a cofounder. Uh, have you been in a relationship, like a business relationship with other people before? Or is this your first time
Speaker 2 08:35 with the, so going into the deal arrows, one founder, there's Matt who started the company and then on our side there's four of us. Um, I've worked with them on various gambling and other kinds of financial projects over the years. Um, but those are very different in that there. Um, well you're not, you're not, you're not managing like a product. You're not, you're kind of building models or finding different ways to get edges in the markets and that sort of thing. So it wasn't like a true cofounder relationship. It's more just <inaudible> kind of business partners in your brainstorming things in and working on what you can. But so while I've worked with them for years and years, I hadn't had like a true cofounder as in like a day to day. We're running this business together and even now I don't consider myself like a co founder of the business just because I kind of took the shortcut of, of jumping in three or four years into Matt's journey. So he's still the founder. Um, he's now head of product. Um, we run it as though we're co founders where even though I'm the CEO, I still, uh, kind of rely very heavily on him and it's very collaborative. But this is definitely the first time I've had that sort of highly collaborative day to day relationship, uh, with a business partner.
Speaker 1 09:58 Yeah. How's it going so far?
Speaker 2 10:00 It's been good. We've just about tripled in terms of, yeah. So that's, yeah. So we've been very happy with that. And I have to kind of keep reminding myself that the numbers look very good. Uh, it's just the day to day can be tough, especially like when Matt is not, um, ease a medullary, not, not a senior developer. He hasn't worked in leading big development teams or really known best practices. So it's like as we hire more developers, as we kind of go through all these management processes and just everything else, it's like just kind of figuring out as we go. And there are a lot of bumps in the road. So it's like the day to day can be, uh, can be tough just cause it just seems like there's always a fire to the house. So he put out, but then I have to just kind of take a step back and look at the big picture and say like, well, we're still doing, doing pretty good. So yes, it's hard to complain.
Speaker 1 10:57 Probably take some solace from like Hubstaff and groove too. I mean those were maybe when you joined, they weren't big businesses like they, I'm sure like they are now. But I mean I'm sure even then there were fires to put out every day in those established successful businesses. I mean I think that, I can imagine it's something that just happens all the time and every business doesn't matter like how much experience you have or how established the businesses there's, there's fires to put out or like, or your business isn't really doing anything and that's a really scary, right?
Speaker 2 11:28 Yeah. And I think the difference to me isn't that th there's never a point where the fires completely stop. I think the more you work on process, the more you kind of pay down your technical debt, the less frequently they come up and hopefully the less aggressively they burn. But every business is going to have problems. The, the big in working with, I'm trying to think when I joined Hubstaff it was still, there's maybe 10 people, so like relatively small groove was around 20, but at both of those companies it was big enough where in marketing I could be more isolated from it, where I would do whatever I could to help in terms of messaging and those types of things or jumping into support if need be, if they were getting overwhelmed. But it was never, I could still kind of move forward on what I had to be done because I knew that there was a CTO and his team kind of tackling those types of problems.
Speaker 2 12:34 And now as, as a CEO, it's sort of like all the problems are my problems and it's, it's when there's, there's four of us now, um, it's me, Matt and the two other developers. I'm kind of first line defense on support and then really just working with those guys to, to see what we can do to kind of, and of fixed the problems as quickly as we can. And so it's, I feel it more now for sure. Just, I think in a lot of, that's not necessarily because those problems go away, but it's just kind of, my role has changed a good amount
Speaker 1 13:08 man for the first. So cast us, we launched May, 2017 so it's like two, almost two and a half years. And I mean we had major, major issues for like the first year, you know, and it's just like looking back now I'm like, how did we launch so early? Cause it was just downtime and like we never like lost data or anything like that. But we would push an update and it would crash the app and you're like, Holy shit. Like my stress level was just through the roof and I'm so glad now. Like we're past that and we have blue, green deployments like that can basically never happen and all this kind of stuff. And I think the thing that, that now I realized that that I think we've been shooting for the whole time is just like predictability and um, <inaudible> a little bit of like process, but like predictability with like you come to work, you do this thing, you push new code out or you started a new marketing campaign. It's all really well thought out and really intentional and there's, there's no surprises that like that would be the ideal, right? If, if you, if you could come in and do all this work and really try to make a difference and move the business forward and there's no unintended surprises, that's like a nasal, we're shooting for it and we're like a lot further on that spectrum now. Um, so that's cool. Yeah.
Speaker 2 14:28 Yeah, it's going through it and we're some of the extra stress for us with our businesses that there is a lot of money on the line for our customers. And the way the contests work is that there is a certain time, it's usually like five minutes before the first pitch or before kickoff or whatever sport is. It's usually five before those games start, your lineups have to be in and you effectively can't really make changes after that. And so there is a window where if something happens with the site, let alone it goes down. Like if, if there's a bug that affects things for a few users, that can mean the difference between that really can cost people thousands of dollars. And so it's, there's just always that kind of worry whenever with the, especially with, with Sundays for football comes around that alright, like we've done everything we can and you just kind of cross your fingers and are ready to jump in. And luckily we, we have prioritized kind of building a more stable systems, kind of that power, everything so that we haven't had any major issues that we haven't been able to come back from. But it's just, it just adds that kind of extra level of anxiety to things.
Speaker 1 15:46 Yeah. Yeah. Oh, I can really, yeah. So that that's interesting. I mean I think this is a really a really interesting decision that, that a lot of people make. I don't know if this was a conscious one for you guys or not, but um, the, the concept of like being really close to the transaction and really close to the money is something that we are not, we are, we're a podcast hosting provider. We're about as far away from like a transaction as you can get I think. Um, and it's still like a really fun, interesting, successful, profitable business. But like I look at folks like Jordan gall of of cart hook, like they, I started out with like, uh, an abandoned cart recovery tool. Like that's, that's pretty close to the money. And then they built like, ah, a customized shopping cart for Shopify. Right. And are going that the transaction is for you. Yeah. And that's, that's kinda like where you guys are sitting is like, okay, we're gonna make all these really analytical decisions for the bets you're making. Like five minutes before they go out. Like you guys have both like time pressure, kind of like Jordan has. And like you're directly and impacting their like, you know, business or what are gambling decisions? That's right sentence.
Speaker 2 16:53 Yeah. It's, it's like with Jordan's business or like anything that's like kind of close to e-commerce, there's not like that one window. It's kind of just the entire, the whole day is a window. I mean at the end of, at late at night, I'm sure they process less than at kind of like six, seven, 8:00 PM. But like they have to be on it all the time. It doesn't matter the time of day. If it goes down, it's going to cost their customers money. And so that, that going, having kind of dealt with what I've dealt with, that freaks me out a lot. Um, but yeah, on our side it's, it's, we're not the site that's taking the bets, but the bets that people are making depend on the data we give them. And the weird kind of part of daily fantasy sports is that for a lot of the way most serious players play is they will enter the contest before their lineups already.
Speaker 2 17:49 They'll kind of reserve their spot. And then this is just bad on, on a lot of their parts, but like they often won't make any changes until like the last minute. You have to wait for news, you have to wait for injury reports, all this thing before you kind of finalize stuff. But they often haven't done like a middle step. So like if they don't get it in, in those last few minutes, their lineups are just kind of wiped out. They just eat that cost. And so yeah, it's, it's, we, we are able to charge more than most other companies and like the consumer space would because at the end of the day we do hope to make our customers more money. But when you are that close to kind of the transaction, there's a lot more responsibility that comes along with it. So it's really a tradeoff. Is that, yeah. So you used this way to charge more, but that's not free money.
Speaker 2 18:38 Right, right, right. Um, you mentioned you have a couple of co-founders and I know you had to like a marketing role before and now you're CEO. Um, are you still like in charge of marketing? But kind of have a CEO title or what's your role specifically now? Yeah, so the way I would look at it is that like my, my role is as a CEO, but it basically means I in responsible for everything that's not development. Um, we are the next hire we make will be someone probably for just part time on support a cause that takes up a lot of my time and it's not, we really pride ourselves on support, but it's not the highest value use of my time. Um, but longterm I think I will be involved in marketing for quite some time. I'd like to bring on someone else down the road, but I still think I would be involved with, with kind of strategy.
Speaker 2 19:36 Um, but it's really kind of a Jack of all trades position right now where it's just whatever comes up. I don't want the devil to get pulled off of what they're doing. So I'll, I'll, I'll kinda tackle whatever I can. And with that I try to time block out some time for marketing, which I do want to be my focus, but it's, it can be tough. Yeah. Yeah, that's, I mean it sounds like a founder kind of job title there is. I am responsible for everything in the end. Uh, and you have to a guard your, you know, some people on your team, like developers or if you had a marketer, uh, to, to not get pulled up into some of these other weird support tickets or worrying about things that they don't need to worry about and let them focus on, you know, the deep work they should be doing.
Speaker 2 20:22 Yeah. More and more I find that's my job is like I need to triage and handle as many things as I can so that the rest of the team can be effective. <inaudible> and it's like I, I've have come to view my role, like my responsibility as like, I want to be the one that's interrupted. I don't want the developers especially, but really anyone else on the team, I don't want them pulled off of what they're working on, which been prioritized in which, which is we're clear how this moving the business forward to work on kind of ad hoc things. But on the other side of that, when you're that person <inaudible> can be hard to get things done. So it's like I, I have a kind of pretty clear marketing roadmap and we've done a good job of kind of executing on that, but it's just not at the pace I would have. I expected when I was like, Oh, I'm going to go full time on this. I can kind of just churn right through this. But it's like, Oh yeah, there's all these other things that have to get done when you're running a business.
Speaker 1 21:16 <inaudible> how do you like, uh, how do you like wearing the product hat? Sounds like you're making a lot of those like product decisions for the developers.
Speaker 2 21:24 Yeah, I, I definitely um, do wear the product hat I'm a good amount and it's something where being in the space and like, like you would podcasting your podcast so you have a good idea of what matters, what doesn't. But on the other side of it though, it's, there are so many different types of podcasts that it can be hard to really get a good idea of what I guess the market as a whole might care about. And so working with Matt, he and I both have different perspectives on how to play daily fantasy sports and that sort of thing. And so we're able to work together a lot on driving, driving things forward. And I think he has kind of a closer pulse on what the average player cares about. My background has been more with, with higher stakes players, with serious professionals who have a different approach then serious, but still casual players who were doing this on the side.
Speaker 2 22:23 But so a lot of what I do is kind of taking that and working with him to figure out how do we deliberately add this to the product in a way that doesn't, doesn't complicate things and actually makes it easy for people to do what they're really trying to do. And it's not easy and it takes a lot of, of kind of guesswork and then getting feedback and testing. And all of that, but we pride ourselves on that and I think that has sticking to that as much as we can rather than just trying to ship as fast as we can has really been a big attributed to our growth.
Speaker 1 23:00 Yeah. Yeah. One of the, one of the most challenging things I've found with kind of, you know, my job now is like head of product slash CEO and uh, our founder and one of the things that we always struggle with optimizing and it certainly is a lot better now and I actually think we're, we're pretty decent at it, decent at it but is like running the whole product process. And I had an episode with, with Jordan about this a few weeks ago and it's just something that I feel like is, is never going to be quote right or done just because there's so many variables that go into like I have an idea or customers come to us and say we want, they want a thing and then it goes to, you know, design and UI and development and QA and testing and then out the door like that. There is a lot of shit that happens in process and
Speaker 2 23:46 I don't know or why have you found that that is like worked pretty pretty well with like you and your team or how's that process been for you guys? It's, it's, that's been like the biggest pain point by far is just figuring out that process. When we brought on the first developer, it was really to help on back end data collection and management and for us to run our models in and simulate all the games we need to have data from a lot of different sources and we need to clean it and normalize it and get into the database and make sure it's update and all of that stuff. Hiring for that wasn't easy, but it wasn't as hard as the higher afterwards is because it was kind of segregated from the product and from, you didn't really have to understand the space as much to get it right and so that worked better than we expected.
Speaker 2 24:43 There was still some kind of problems with that. We had with not specking things out as much as we should because there was some decisions that Matt and I might have taken for granted but weren't obvious, uh, to someone newer. Um, but it wasn't that big of a deal. But then we hired someone more full stack to really help accelerate development on the app itself. And that is where kind of just everything went out the window and we really just had to work on every piece of that process. And it's still something where we're figuring out, and I, I don't at all think we haven't figured out and I think it's going to be something that we have to work out for a while because it's, the first thing is just getting someone familiar with your code base. And so we just completely underestimated the onboarding aspect of it, which kind of compounded everything going forward.
Speaker 2 25:35 But once we kind of had the developer up to speed on the code base, there's still that decade of domain experience that Matt and I each have that he doesn't have. And even when we try to be as specific as we can, there's just things we're not going to, to think about as much. And so we've done our best to have like a clear specifications step and then to have QA and then it's defining more of what that means and what's supposed to come out of each of them. But it takes time. And uh, there's a big difference, which is probably one of the hardest things for me to wrap my head around. It's like a very type a person is that there's a huge difference between seeing like solid product process or any process written out and then actually implementing that and getting a team to execute on it and figuring out what you need to have do to manage it and make sure it's on track and all of that. It's like the process is like relatively straight forward, but executing on that consistently is where, where we've been struggling. So that's kind of definitely the biggest thing we've been working on. And kind of just taking couple of steps forward, few steps backwards
Speaker 1 26:44 and rinsing and repeating there. Yeah. And before any a, any developers listening want to take an burn us to marketing guys at the stake for, for talking trash about them. Uh, I put all of this squarely on my shoulders and I'm sure you do ticket that. Like, and I want to say this one because I know our whole team listens to my podcast. Uh, and now because I asked them to it just because they find it interesting and we talk about and interesting stuff. But I mean we have experiences all the time where I say, Hey, let's go do a thing. And they say, yup, I totally know what you mean. We hop on a call, we walked through it, I give them some screenshots and they come back with like a thing that's just not quite exactly what I had in mind. And like every time I go back, like you're saying like, did I run the process that we agreed on every time that what they deliver is not what I had in mind.
Speaker 1 27:30 The answer to that question is no. Right. Cause it's, yeah, I took a shortcut here or I assumed something, uh, about what, you know, that they have telepathy and they have, you know, seen all this shit that I have seen and, and, and know and feel. <inaudible> and that's just the hardest part is like really consistently and in a very detailed manner, giving exactly what you want so that your team can go be successful because otherwise there really aren't our developers really great. I'm sure yours are too. And they say, I want to go make the best thing for our team so that we can move the ball forward and they go make a thing. And if I give them incomplete information then it's only as good as that incomplete information. Yeah. We struggle with this. And again, I put it all on my shoulders. Um,
Speaker 2 28:13 no, I completely agree. It's that <inaudible> who like, I think it all, any process failures, any real failures I think have to fall back to the founder or to the CEO because that's kind of our job is to, to fix those things in. If they are broken to be the ones to help fix it and make sure that they don't break again. And if they do, again, if that's kind of our job and it's, we have, what I've struggled with the most is I've, I kind of was like a Brian castle disciple when, when he first kind of started talking about process and I really got deep into process and working with VA's and all of that. So I have a good idea of like how to map out this is kind of what needs to happen. And so that saved us some pain. But where I didn't think as much about is like in all the decisions that have to come in between that or like in the actual implementation, if someone isn't as familiar with our code base, if they don't have the domain expertise that we have, it's very, very easy for them to get stuck on what seems like a blocker or seems like something that needs to be figured out when it really just doesn't matter at all.
Speaker 2 29:25 And that's where we've lost a ton of time is just not being providing enough kind of guidance along the way of seeing like these are the actual things that that matter and Oh this thing you've been working on for the last week that actually never will. Like it literally happen in production. Cause like those situations just don't exist. And so for that it's just been making sure that we have a more active process. Where Matt now is, is having a true daily stand up and, and kind of getting a bit more into the weeds of, okay, so what are the things specifically you're working on? How are you going to approach that? Here's some ideas, here's what not to worry about. It's little things that seem super obvious, but it's just, it's not that, it's not always that simple to actually get it, get it done and get it right.
Speaker 1 30:10 Yeah. Yeah. No, we've, we've iterated on, on process and communication a lot and this is not the whole conversation I wanted to have, but just to wrap up like something that we've found and we're only in the first few weeks of like this whole kind of process, but we have three regular points of communication with the whole team. Uh, one is Monday at 9:00 AM Eastern, we have an all team, all hands kind of meeting. It's six people and that is really just a, a chance to discuss things that we all need to talk about together. So that's really cool. It's an hour and it's always full of like really actionable stuff. And that's, I like it on Monday to where the rest of the week people have stuff to go do. We have one on ones that are between me and each of the team members, uh, at different points throughout the week.
Speaker 1 30:54 And they're only 30 minutes and that's great just to <inaudible>, just to shoot the shit. And we always talk a fair amount of work, but that's not what they're for. But it's always like clarifying some of these things. So I like that they're kind of scattered through the week where we have the Monday call, people go do some work and then we catch up about, you know, clarifying this or catching up or progress update. Do you do a one on one with everybody each week? Yeah. Okay. Yup. <inaudible> so are 30 minutes. So it's not, you know, it's three hours of my time. It's not that much. And then we have daily stand ups automated on Slack so they're not real time. They're a sync cause we have about half our people here in half in the U S so, so they need to be async everyday like if their everyday like that and it's great.
Speaker 1 31:32 And the thing I realized is I am a big like no organization person. Like I, if it was just me it would be a disaster. Right? But everyone else is not like that. Right. Everyone else <inaudible> is not a founder there a a team member, an employee. Right. And, and they like direction and clarity and expectations being, you know, set forth like for them. Um, and so when we say on Monday, okay, this is the big thing we all want to get done this week, Denise, this is your to do list Eileen this year to list Craig this year to do list. Everyone loves it because there's no more guesswork of like, okay, I roll into work and what the hell am I going to do? Uh, and then like the next week we say, okay great, we've got all this stuff done. Doesn't everyone feel great about it? That was like the most surprising thing to me is like when we started breaking things down like that people reacted, everyone on the team reacted really positively and, and is asking for like more of that which blew my mind. Um, but it was really cool to see.
Speaker 2 32:32 Yeah, that's it. It's funny because I am the opposite where like I am very, very type a and my ideal systems are way more intense than like I could actually implement. But like, I'm always trying to get like everything out of my head, everything on two into Trello and the notion wherever it might be and like get everything somewhere and make sure that there's always a plan and this and that and like I can go too far with it. So some of our sticking points have been aye am like hyper aware that people aren't, don't think like me all the time. And so it's like I've kind of backed off in some spots too much from the <inaudible> process and it's just trying to find that, that middle ground of saying, okay, people have different ways of working, but objectively let's find some system of organization that can work for everybody.
Speaker 2 33:22 Yeah. Yup. Yup. I want to pivot over to talk about your podcast a little bit. So the effective founder, how many episodes are you in there? So yeah, so I'm technically like into this kind of, I guess pivot of this show about like 30 episodes and it was the early stage founder and I had almost a hundred episodes of that. Um, but really what I kind of realized over time of just doing so many episodes and doing so many interviews and I had hosted a podcast for Hubstaff called the agency advantage podcast where I just interviewed agency owners and just having done so many of those interviews and having worked in content for so long, I felt like I was just kind of adding to the noise and that there are all of these places where you can go to find the latest hacks and the latest kind of methodology to do X, Y and Z. And it's just like, I don't think that needs to be more of that, especially for the audience I'm trying to reach where I think it's similar to yours where it's really that for me it's not necessarily bootstrap, but it's people who are trying to, they're in those early stages.
Speaker 2 34:35 They, they have something out there and they're trying to grow it, whether they're full time or not, they have something out there and people are using it and it's just, those are the founders I think can get so distracted by all of these different ideas and different kind of flavors of the month that come out when at the end of the day for companies that are even doing a couple million a year in recurring revenue, you don't need to complicate things. <inaudible> is, especially when it comes to marketing or anything else, it's like find a few things that work and just keep doing those and figure out how to double down on those. And if you can keep doing that, like you can build a very successful business. I mean Hubstaff and groove are both multi multimillion dollar a year businesses and they've grown on content and I think those are all the hacks out there. All of these other ideas, all these other things, they can give you a good starting point, but at a certain point you just have to execute. And I think those are a distraction, which is why I kind of pivoted this show. Talking
Speaker 1 35:38 more about just the, the, the founders journey really. And the things I think that don't get talked about enough. Like kind of what we've been talking about is the, the struggles and just what it takes to, to overcome those things and just what to kind of expect in. And you guys have been doing a great job of kind of fighting that fight for a while. So I just kinda wanted to, to throw my hat in that ring as well. Yeah, no, and it's a great show. I mean, I think that to, to do an interview show kind of in our world these days and do it well is difficult and you've definitely pulled it off. I mean, I listened to every episode and, and get a lot out of each of them. You have, you have really interesting people on, um, a lot of people like I've never heard of, which is really cool because I think those are the people that add a lot of value to, to, to these kinds of shows. So yeah, it's really well done. I definitely encourage everyone to check it out.
Speaker 2 36:26 Oh, I appreciate that. And it kind of going from what you were saying before with some of your questions, how they're just selfish questions and that's, that's kind of how I approach my podcast as well, where it's, I, I love talking to kind of the name brands in the MicroComp world. I love having Steli on. I love having Rob in those guys. I mean you of course as well. But it is fun also to to branch outside of that world a little bit and just kind of see how other people are approaching it and just ask the kind of questions like I have no idea how a business at that scale operates or what you even are thinking about when you have a bunch of money in the bank or these other things. I just like having different people and to kind of selfishly ask those questions. Yeah,
Speaker 1 37:10 yup. Yeah. It really is a great medium to, to, to be a little selfish and ask those questions. But I think like you're a really savvy guy and so that's why this show is successful because you ask those like good questions and then everyone who's listening says, wow, that's a really good question. And the response is like, wow, that's really interesting. I never thought of that. I think that's like when it works. Yeah.
Speaker 2 37:29 And hopefully it works more often than not, or at least offer enough that people keep listening.
Speaker 1 37:34 But, you know, last thing I wanted to chat through is you obviously have a like a strong marketing experience from two really successful companies like Hubstaff where you kind of started the marketing effort and even grooves sounded like you joined pretty early on there. Um, and we actually talked, Dave and I talked about Alex's kind of recent, some of his recent posts on, on an episode not too long ago about like how the business was, it was kind of a mess and almost fell apart, um, a few years into it even though they were doing, you know, hundreds of thousands of dollars of MRR. The, I guess the question is like when, when you've been in those kinds of situations of like a really fast growing but established business to then going to a situation like you're in now where like you're wearing all these hats and, and things are on fire all the time. Like what positive things have you brought from the Hubstaff and groove experiences that you think you're imparting now at saber SEM?
Speaker 2 38:26 I think I was fortunate in hindsight to have kind of grown a, to kind of join both of those companies that kind of turning for them where there were some growing pains, um, where they were scaling beyond teams that could all kind of sit at a single table together and was able to kind of see how both sets of founders approach those, what worked and what didn't work. And just kind of very early on in my marketing career, got a crash course in what needs to go right to scale. And I was lucky to kind of see things not go right and then to stick around for both of them as a, they kind of figure things out a lot better. And so that really just prepared me for kind of the importance of getting some of these things right as early on as you can so that you can avoid some of those growing pains.
Speaker 2 39:20 They're obviously never going to go away. Like we said there, there's always going to be fires, but it really taught me a lot about process, about just being deliberate and about being clear about what you're doing. And why and that wasn't, no, I didn't, I don't necessarily think I learned ton or at least I didn't learn as much valuable stuff about marketing. I did learn a lot in those areas. What I learned more just kind of applied more broadly, which to me now and in my current role is much more valuable and it's just really how to think about systems and teams and getting people, uh, working towards kind of the same goal, uh, as effectively as possible.
Speaker 1 40:02 Yeah, no, I can imagine that that's hugely successful. I mean, I, especially as a leader in your, your organization now, like that's really your a whole job, right? It's like getting everyone rowing the boat the same direction,
Speaker 2 40:22 have even more respect because it's like I knowing what other people have gone through, I've been able to avoid some challenges, but there's still so many more that I haven't, that I've had to figure out. And I'm doing this with like a team of, of four people, including myself. Whereas I can only imagine everything that must come along with this. When you're at thousands of customers and, and 10, 20, 30 plus employees. So if it's going through it, I'm, I'm glad to have learned from, from founders and see what works for them and what didn't. But it makes me respect a lot more kind of all the other founders out there and what everyone is going through. Cause it's never easy. Yeah.
Speaker 1 41:03 Yeah. Nice. Uh, any for folks who want to, to kinda catch up with you after the show and then follow along with what you're doing, where's the best place to connect?
Speaker 2 41:11 So I have a Twitter account that I don't really use that much. Uh, but it's at Andy Baldacci. I might occasionally retweet some interesting things and maybe I'll start sending out some real tweets, but that's still to be decided. So the best place is honestly, probably just tuning into the effective founders show. Uh, you can just go to effective founder.com or find an iTunes or any other podcasting app, but if you want to reach out, if you have any questions, um, anything at all, you can always just shoot me an email as well at Andy at Baldacci, that's B a L D a cci.org. That's really probably the best way to get ahold of me and I, I'm not so popular that I don't, uh, have an overwhelming amount of emails I get each day. So I definitely will read everyone that comes in and do our best to respond. Awesome. Awesome. Andy, this is a lot of fun. Thanks so much for coming on the show. No, I really appreciate this. It was a good fun way to catch up and kind of vent a little bit as well. All right. Have a good one.
Speaker 0 42:13 You too. Thanks for listening to another episode of rogue startups. If you haven't already, head over to iTunes and leave a rating and review for the show for show notes from each episode and a few extra resources to help you along your journey. Head over to rogue startups.com to learn more <inaudible>.
