Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: Foreign.
I sit down with Jesse Hanley from Bento, popular email marketing, marketing automation service. Jesse's somebody I followed online for a long time and I love his story and kind of the ethos and the culture that he's building at Bento. We have wanted to chat for a long time. Finally got on the mic and this is not an interview. This is more like a co host style conversation about stuff that's going on in my business, stuff that's going on in his business, stuff that's going on in our lives. Very timely. We're talking about tariffs and the current kind of economic situation. So as you're listening to this, as I'm talking, the economy is not in a great spot. What does that mean for us as businesses? What does this mean for us as entrepreneurs? How are we protecting ourselves and our businesses and our families from kind of the uncertainty in the economic world right now? I really loved this conversation. This was one of the kind of the best co host kind of conversations that I've had in a long time. Definitely have Jesse back on for a part two here shortly. But in the meantime, I hope you enjoy this conversation with Jesse from Bento.
Where are you from, by the way?
[00:01:12] Speaker B: I'm Australian. I'm an Aussie. So I grew up in Sydney and then did the Nomad thing for a while and then ended up getting married to my Canadian wife in Japan. So that's why I'm now in Japan.
[00:01:24] Speaker A: Oh, right on, right on. Cool. It's funny, I. I talk to a lot of people who are like, oh, like, do you miss living in France? I lived in France for five and a half years and I'm like, yeah, every day. Every day I miss living in France. Teeth.
That's a good question. Like, in hindsight, we should have stayed. Like, we should have stayed. But it was like four things all at one time. Like, it was Covid. It was like aging parents and wanting to be here close to family. It was taxes, which was like an unrealized worry for sure because the market changed all of a sudden. And then it was.
My daughter was in middle school. Like, my oldest was in middle school and she was like doing physics in French. And it was just like, oh, man. Like, it's kind of hard enough. Like, and like, I don't even understand the question. And I'm like, up. You know, I have. My degree is in biomedical engineering. Like, I know. Shit.
It's just kind of like all that at one time. And it was just like, I don't like living in France. Was like a really long vacation for us. Like, it was really idyllic. Kind of like you're talking about like the cherry blossoms and the kids and all this kind of stuff and like the, the, the wonderful part of it was kind of over for us in a way. For me, like my wife loved it and she, she wanted to stay forever.
[00:02:34] Speaker B: Were you in South France or north?
[00:02:37] Speaker A: So like southeast. Yeah, so like just south of Geneva. A little town called Annecy.
[00:02:41] Speaker B: Oh, beautiful. Nice.
[00:02:43] Speaker A: It was amazing. It would be like living in Tahoe if, if you're from the States. Like, you know, it's like mountains, lake, skiing, you know, all four seasons.
[00:02:51] Speaker B: What was the, what was the affordability like in France?
Just kind of like doing day to day life. Was it, was it more affordable than the us I've got no, I've only traveled there as like a tourist and it was, you know, against. Yeah, Euroverse Australia. It was a little bit expensive, but what was it like living there as an American?
[00:03:07] Speaker A: So like the part of France we lived in was like, aside from Paris, probably the most expensive and it was quite a bit cheaper than living here. I live in New England in the US so like between Boston and New York, everything is between 50 and 100% more expensive here.
[00:03:20] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, we, we just did a trip back to Sydney, so go back and do the first trip back with a two year old to go see, you know, all of our relatives and stuff. Yeah. And man, I was just blown away by the prices of some stuff. Right. Like feeding a family.
It was, it was literally maybe like 10x the price sometimes versus Japan and. Yeah, and I actually think I originally like started following you because I think I ran into a post about you living in France and I was like, oh, that's super cool. Like, I really like the stories of like software founders living abroad. I don't know, it was really romantic at the time. So. Yeah, I think that's actually how I why I started following you in the first place. Oh, cool. So if I found a France, I'm gonna go follow. I want to do something like that.
[00:04:04] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, likewise. And I like, I thought you were American. I don't know why I thought you were American. I knew you were living in Japan, but I like when you and I just started talking a few minutes ago, I was like, whoa. Like that's.
He's.
[00:04:14] Speaker B: Yeah. My accent though, my accent though, I think has like died over the years because I've been, I think it's almost like a decade abroad and I sell to so many Americans. And so yeah, like my accent has had, I've had to like kill it and I've had to like stop myself saying certain phrases just because initially when I started Americans couldn't really understand me so much to dial it down a little bit.
[00:04:37] Speaker A: But yeah, yeah, cool. So I want to talk about like, I want to talk about a few things. Like I mentioned, like this is not an interview. Like I think I know you. I feel like I know you well enough from like our discussions on Twitter. I want to talk about AI, I want to talk about tariffs because like today like I just saw a thing on Twitter like the future Dow futures open limit down. Right. So third day in a row. Like worst, worst kind of days since 2008 probably. But. But first I just want to hear like what you're working on right now with Bento. Like Bento obviously email marketing system. I know you're CRM, super interesting, like kind of going up against HubSpot, but like what, what are you not. Yeah. So what are you working on? And then like what's the vision?
[00:05:18] Speaker B: I guess, yeah, the, the vision's. I'll start with that because the vision's pretty, pretty simple. So like my main desire with Bento is that I just want to work on stuff that I want to work on every single day. And I just kind of have continuously pulled on that thread. I don't have like a backlog of really like features that I pull on. I don't really do too much planning.
It's very much like vibe coding. But I've been doing it for a while. I've been doing it for, since like the start of the company effectively.
And I just like, I like working like that. We, I get stuff that pops up in the discord. I get stuff from customers and like that's how I, I build thematically. I am pushing in a direction where it's anything to do with email. So historically we've been very good at marketing email. So sending broadcasts, automations, all that. We're very good at newsletters and sending large volume email at once and we're starting to get better at like kind of two way conversations. And so I'm like kind of pulling on that thread right. So good at one to one email, good at one to many email. And then the next one is like how do we get good at responding to the inbound. We've already got a product called Bento Chat which has like a support inbox thing. And so I'm kind of trying to shove that into like a sales CRM function almost.
[00:06:37] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:06:37] Speaker B: So that people can basically, anywhere that they send an email, they can kind of like do it within Bento and. Yeah, and I'm just trying to make those areas better for all my customers. And it's been interesting. Like the largest change that we made in like the last six to 12 months was like transactional emails. So, you know, we're a replacement now for Postmark, we're a replacement for Sendgrid. And that's very sticky. And it's been really interesting. Like we're getting a lot of Laravel customers coming in, we're getting more Rails customers coming in, we're getting more of these like library customers. And it's just, it's been a very sticky product compared to marketing, which, you know, people can toggle off and all that. But transactional email, they're locked in once they're integrated. So. Yeah, yeah, I don't know. But then tackling so many different features, it's like just stuff pops up every day. And so instead of getting overwhelmed by like a lot of that, I just try and go, all right, like, what are the problems for today? I'm going to try and like solve them and do a good job of that and then kind of like move on. And the product kind of like naturally gets built that way and actually feels quite, quite nice.
Yeah. If that makes sense.
[00:07:41] Speaker A: What does like the team look like? So you're obviously still bidding product. What's the rest of the team like?
[00:07:47] Speaker B: Yeah, sure. And just to give like, I haven't really mentioned this on like other podcasts, but to give like a bit of perspective, like revenue is at the seven figure mark a year, so where doing over seven figs. It is just me as full time employees.
I've got a guy called Zach who helps with like docs and stuff and a lot of our integrations. He's been like a recent addition, like this year. And he's just part time. He like lives in Japan, so he's close by.
[00:08:11] Speaker A: That's awesome.
[00:08:11] Speaker B: Yeah, and I met, I met his kids down the road at like the science museum and stuff. So it's. Yeah, anyway, and he's like one of those like guys who's just great at every language. You're like, oh, you do go write a Swift library. And then he goes writes a Swift library. It's like he's like, oh, I don't know, I feel like writing a Go Library. Then we'll go do that. So the guy's like a little bit unhinged, but he's been, he's been very cool. And then I'm working with the Fast Ruby team at the moment to do like a lot of code upgrades and stuff that's like kind. That's honestly like kind of it. So I use like the Fast Ruby team as like pro contract devs to help with stuff. Yeah. And then I bring in people that are like experts when I need help. So it's like a guy called Andy who I like, ping. Whenever I got like postgres issues, I'll find just pros bring them in for kind of like a mercenary sprint. Right. Like they're just hired to kill down an issue and then, and then they leave. And that, that, that's worked. That's worked pretty well. And I've also found that like, we'll probably end this a little bit later. There's been like some hires that I haven't really needed to tap into because of a lot of the AI stuff as well. So for example, our business has like a compliance component to it and a lot of companies will resolve that by hiring like compliance teams in the Philippines or Eastern Europe or whatever. And they're like literally looking at email templates nonstop. And AI has just removed that need for us. Anytime an email template is saved in Bento, it's run against a whole bunch of OpenAI checks and stuff. And then they get flagged and we kill the accounts and. And it's good. Like we'll get like a.
What did we catch like last month? Last month we caught like someone, they signed up, connected their Shopify store, tried to create like a Facebook Thai phishing link. Right. So it's all in Thai script and the AI is like, kill this account.
[00:10:04] Speaker A: That's crazy.
[00:10:05] Speaker B: It works. And then with the WordPress integrations, right. WordPress sites obviously get a lot of like spam. And so we've got a transactional plugin and if we notice we've got this escalation measure. So it's like if we notice a link that is not a part of the brand. So let's say Castos is like, can you connect the WordPress? And someone puts in a link in a form and something, we try and send that, we run that to the AI. The AI quickly checks that transactional email and then goes, ah, that's sus. And then we'll flag it for review. And that catches stuff every day. Right. So there's those components where they would be like hires and compliance teams and we just don't need them. And I also. There's another Person who works for me. I don't know if I mentioned Anya. And Anya is like my operations person. She's in Eastern Europe and so she handles a lot of support whilst I'm sleeping. And so nice. If something, you know, there's a service issue, she'll call me or whatever. But yeah, that's, that's more or less a team.
[00:11:01] Speaker A: That's cool. That's cool. So we're. We're also like seven figures. Like kind of low to mid seven figures. And we're a team of eight. And you know, one thing that I see is so interesting is like, by the way, amazing, right? One just you7 figures, like that. This is, you know, you see this, like Sam Altman said, there's going to be a billion dollar, like one person company. And I think that you're.
[00:11:22] Speaker B: I believe it.
[00:11:22] Speaker A: You're like the little nugget of that, right? Like that's. But it's the model, right? It's that model and you know, just more scale.
We're a team of eight. Like, I'm not a developer so, like, have to lean on development quite a bit. But. But one thing that I think about and like our team listens to this podcast, this isn't a surprise, but like, how much more effective can a team be with. With AI and like, how much more effective should they be? You know, I think this is kind of like what a lot of us are and a lot of big companies are kind of saying, like, you know, the thing I always say is, like, I think there's just going to be like 30% less jobs in a year. Maybe, you know, like, there's just going to be less jobs because you are more effective. So I need to hire a third less employees.
And then I think about that from our perspective now, we're already 8. How can that 8 be 30% or 50% more effective? And like, where else do they work? It's basically like you bring in a chat bot that's trained on your docs and you have less support inquiries. What does that support person do now? They have 30% more of their time. I think this is kind of the math that we're all, that we're all kind of like working through.
[00:12:27] Speaker B: We're talking from, we're talking from like my perspective, it ends up being I just don't hire. So you're in a position where, like, you know, it's like, how do I get more out of my place? I think maybe that's not the right question. I think it's kind of yeah, like how can you use AI just not to hire again? You know? So like how does that team, how do you get more growth out of your business and stay at 8 and like not feel pain when you're double or triple a size and you can still do that eight people. So I think that tends to be like more of the question because I find that whenever I run into a problem, if I just wait a little bit long enough and maybe like feel a little bit of pain, stuff does get resolved. Right. I remember the compliance thing was a really big pain in the butt and I was like, oh, can I really run these large HTML blocks against opening it? Like that's not cost effective, is it? And then like, you know, cost get slashed down to a tenth and then slash down again and you're just like, okay, we're getting to a point where you really can abuse these effectively abuse these monsters, hit them a whole bunch of times and get what you want out of them.
And then yeah, even my own usage of cursor, I use that day to day coding. And in terms of am I more effective than I was before? I think the answer is I'm probably the same, maybe a little bit faster. But I get tired a lot. I got a two year old, like I, it's I stuff going on all the time. I've got family stuff, I've got personal stuff, like just I get tired and like my brain's not functioning but with assistance I perform okay. And yeah, that, that's how, that's how it's kind of helped me where it's like, yeah, I don't know. Like sometimes I remember like when I, when Evie was first born and I was like tired or stressed or whatever. I just remember like looking at my computer being like, I just can't work today. Yeah. And if I have those same moments now, I'm like, I can work.
I probably got to be better at reviewing my code, but I can at least explain what I want to do and then just tab my way through it. And it's a different way to work, but it's helped tremendously just on like a personal level, just getting through the day. So that's where at least I find the gains.
[00:14:48] Speaker A: I, I mean, that's interesting. I've not thought about it like this, but I think it has postponed us needing to hire a marketing person because I'm kind of sales marketing and yeah, I have a pretty smart little marketing person that works with me 247 now. Right. Like almost like the, to me, the Biggest value is kind of like ideation. Like, hey, I want to do this thing. Help me kind of just get off the ground. Right. It avoids the kind of blank, blank page rule or problem. But then also like, I wrote this thing. What do you think? And it's like, oh, you didn't talk about this or this or this. So yeah, I mean it's, it's like, it's not, it's not a 10 out of 10, it's a 5 maybe out of 10. But that's kind of all I need just to have a little bit of support sometimes. And I'm sure I'm not used to it for sure.
[00:15:32] Speaker B: It was a two last year, right? It was a two last, a one out of 10 last year. So yeah, I don't know. And I think initially I was pretty skeptical. I was like, this stuff's like, I just don't buy into the hype. But then I started looking at my own usage. I'm being super hypocritical here because I'm using the living daylight out of these tools on a day to day basis with cursor. I really need to kind of rethink my mental model a little bit. And I'm actually noticing this trend recently of people that are like the worst skeptical, that are like kind of coming around to it even like, you know, all the MCP server stuff. Like I initially didn't really understand how a lot of that stuff worked and I was like, ah, look at like another fad protocol or whatever. And then I'm seeing some of the things people are doing with them and I'm like, okay, that's like, that's kind of pretty interesting. Like I saw someone, they like turned their whole code base into like a graphql, like node tree or whatever and then they're able to like query it a lot better with an MCP server and all that. I'm just, I'm like seeing cool use cases where I'm like, I don't know, like maybe I, I can do more and explore a little bit more in this area.
[00:16:42] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:16:43] Speaker B: But yeah, I don't know. I don't know. It's moving fast.
[00:16:46] Speaker A: So I want to ask from a personal perspective. So how long have you been running Bento?
[00:16:53] Speaker B: Five. Five. Probably a bit more than five years now. Okay, five years. Yeah. Full time since COVID by the way. Yeah.
[00:17:01] Speaker A: Okay. Yeah. So five years. How do you feel about like another five years or 10 years? You strike me as the guy that's like, hey, this is just cool. I'M gonna do this, you know, forever. You're gonna be des trainer, right?
[00:17:11] Speaker B: Like, yeah, no, I'm like, I don't know. I'm a great des trainer.
I think slightly different ambitions. That'd be cool though. Yeah, I, I, I'm, I'm pretty happy doing this for another 5 years, 10 years, 20 years. Like, I, I'm, yeah, I pretty chill. I mean, like the way my thinking's a little bit different there. I think before I ran this business during COVID I sold my agency and I like kind of exit a couple like little small SEO projects and stuff. And that, that plus some savings provides like enough economic security that I'm, I'm fine for a pretty long time. So it changes how I think about like money with this business because I've had like a mini exit and I can, you know, with like all the tariff stuff and all that. I'm not, I'm not really, I'm not personally, like, I'm seeing my money go down and stuff, but I'm not deathly afraid and I think that that changes how I think about this business because I've already extracted capital. So for me, and I also live in Japan, so my cost of living is quite cheap. My expenses are quite low and so I have low risk and so my need to extract capital from the business is quite low.
So, yeah, I mean, most of the profits end up going back into like the market. Like, it's not, it's, it's because I'm not hiring. Right. Like, if I was in a bit more of like a growth, growth mind, I could probably hire more people and put money on ads and really ramp it up. But I, I'm just, I don't want, I don't want to do that because I quite like my life and I quite like my way of living and so I don't want to actually screw that up.
So yeah, I don't know. How do you think about it with customers? How do you think about, I guess, cash extraction for the business?
[00:19:01] Speaker A: Yeah, so, so it's changed over time for us. So we've raised some money, right? So we've raised like just under a million dollars total. So we definitely have, you know, folks who are accountable to and so I can't just do, you know, whatever I want. I still own the vast, vast majority of the company.
But so, so for, we raised money because for a long time it was like, hey, we're going to go super hard. We're going to spend all the money we have. We're Going to go, go as hard as we can. We're going to hire. We hired a whole bunch. We didn't grow very fast, and so we had to fire a bunch of folks. And that was super lame.
And at this point it's like, okay, we're growing and we're profitable. And I'm working largely on pretty much what I want to work on. The team is really solid.
And yeah, for the first time, I'm kind of like, ooh, like, yeah, if we grow another million from here, I'll just take it home, you know, and like, I would have to like, pay our investors or buy some of them out or whatever. But, like, but, but for the. Because, like, I've all going back to like, some of the very first episodes of this podcast. I've been like, I want to sell. I want to build a business and sell it and make that money. And now, especially with the shift that's going on in the last few days, I'm like, man, imagine if you had sold a month ago and you put it all on the market two weeks ago.
[00:20:16] Speaker B: That. But, but it's like you have a cash flowing asset that you actually have control on and arguably, like, the returns on that asset are going to be larger than the S and P anyway, I would assume, right? Like, your return on capital in Texas is, is going to be more than the s and P500.
And so especially right now. And that's also how I look at like Bento. It's like, yeah, it, like take some, like, it is, it is better than all the cash that I have in the bank. Like, I. Why, why would I want to, why would I want to sell that? It provides me cash. It's got cash flow. I can control it. I can, I can save money on expenses. I can try and, you know, ramp up sales to get, get more money. Like, I, I can't do that. Like, I don't really control the markets. I can change how the portfolio is kind of split. But I don't know, like, I look at what you have and I'm like, that's better than liquidity right now.
[00:21:09] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, yeah. I, I think the, I think if I'm honest though, the challenge is like, so we're eight years into Castos and, And I've said, you know, like, there's the seven year itch in marriage. I don't know. That's an American saying. Do you know, Is this an expression?
[00:21:24] Speaker B: I know it's an American saying, but I know.
[00:21:25] Speaker A: Okay, okay. You know, I kind of had it. Last year I was like, gosh, like, you know, we weren't growing as fast as we want. We weren't, like, super profitable. I was like, gosh, I want to do something else. Started doing some coaching that's really fulfilling. So that takes up some of my time.
But I think it's been this bit of distance that's helped me realize, like, oh, man, like, the grass is just never greener. Like, this is pretty awesome. Like, oh, if I'm, you know, I talk like, I talk about, like, the ideal SaaS business. It's. It's like 3 degrees off of what I have probably, you know, and, like, you have shit that I don't have to deal with, like email deliverability and spammers and getting woken up in the middle of the night, like, knock on wood, I haven't been woken up in the middle of the night in six years, probably.
[00:22:10] Speaker B: I'll touch. I'll touch all the wood around my house.
[00:22:12] Speaker A: I know, I know, I know, I know. I got. But I got all the stuff. And we have, you know, but like, we have a pretty chill, you know, problem that we solve for customers. And it's a. It's a fun industry. Like, sure. Could we charge more money? Could we have more expansion revenue built in the business? Yeah, we don't. But, like, the rest of it's pretty nice.
And I think I. Dude, if I'm honest, I think the biggest reason I haven't done something else is I don't know that I could do better than this.
[00:22:38] Speaker B: You know what? I'm not even going to push back on that. That could be true. I also have that same fear, and I think it's probably better to pull on this thread a lot longer than. I don't even know what I would do. I've thought about it sometimes, like, oh, I've got some really challenging problems. I like doing those problems. If I want more problems, maybe I could raise money and find more problems.
[00:23:00] Speaker A: You would definitely find more problems if you raise money.
Yeah.
[00:23:04] Speaker B: So I can actually create more problems to solve if I. If I want to. But I think, like, trying to practice a little bit of, like, being content and just being, like, okay with what you've got and what you're trying to resolve. I think that's a lot easier to say when things are going well, though. So I think, like, if both you and me faced a lot of, like, stagnation or even, like, a decline in revenue, which, you know, who. Who knows if there's like, a broader recession or whatever, if that like impacts us on like a, a larger level. But yeah, maybe there might be a vibe shift there. But then I would argue that like, it's probably better solving a lot of those issues within the same business and trying to start again. Like those first few years I didn't know what I was doing and like Bento wasn't even anywhere close to what it is today. Right. So I don't, I don't want to do that again. I don't want, I actually really don't want to do the discovery phase again. And I'm, I'm totally cool with that.
[00:23:52] Speaker A: Yeah, Yeah. I want to talk about the kind of broader market because, yeah, like we're recording this, it's April 6th. Right. We just had the worst two days in the Dow since 2008. Futures open, kind of limit down for tomorrow. So it's not looking good. We're buying, we got some dry powder. So my wife said to me the other day, she's like, so are we going to buy some of this? Like, I was like, yeah, let's do it. I said, let's wait till Monday because I don't think it's getting better.
[00:24:15] Speaker B: No, no, I think it's, I think we're going to see something. But I mean, was it Jim Cramer? That, that stuck guy, he, you know how people do like the inverse. Kramer. Yeah, ye, whatever. He says. He said it's going to be like another Black Friday. So who knows, we might actually be up on one show. Okay, we'll see, we'll see.
[00:24:32] Speaker A: But like, okay, so none of us have crystal ball, but like what are you thinking about with this? Like there's the tariffs and like, you know, I think it could be kind of this like multi headed kind of storm. Right? Of like the tariffs, the economy not being great anyhow, interest rates are high and then like the fear of AI. Like what do you kind of think about for the next kind of 12 months?
[00:24:56] Speaker B: Yeah, sure. So the thing that I think about most is about like the psychology of just my customers. And so for, for me, what I know will be true is that they'll all care a lot about costs. They're going to, they're going to start looking. It doesn't really matter. Like this happened. I actually noticed this when all the Doge stuff started happening in the US I got so many like tickets about like price optimization. So I've actually seen this for a while. Is just like all my customers looking to cut costs, which I don't get. Like, I'll, I'll Help them and I'll, I'll, I'll figure it all out. But I noticed a drastic increase in I got to cut down my bill. My bill's too high. Da da da da da. Or hey, I'm migrating from Klaviyo because the costs are too high. So it benefited me in some ways. Right. So there's a bit of a. And that's when I slapped like a. Are you migrating from somewhere else like kind of call to action on like. So that's how I kind of took action on that. Which is like I'm going to try and scoop some of this churn from like other providers that aren't going to move as fast on pricing or maybe not be so flexible. But whenever this stuff goes on, regardless of how it impacts everyone on like a financial level, I just know that everyone just starts thinking about cost cutting and SaaS and cutting away SaaS light items is very easy. So you know when you, when you, when you go in through there and you're like cool, I can cut off my email provider and save a grand a month. Done. I'm going to switch to some self hosted thing and I actually don't really care about what the results are of that. And so you see, you see some of that. So if you're a product that's kind of been positioned for like you know, less, less cost, what is it like less like cheap provider type thing and you're more like a value based, high end ish, you'll probably feel a lot of pain I think in that type of position in coming into what's going to come and then that, that will probably be true at least for the next year I think because that's all America is talking about is like cutting costs or trying to restructure the debt. Yeah. I don't know. Thematically I think that's what's going to happen with customers in at least in the U.S. yeah.
[00:27:00] Speaker A: Cool. Okay. And I think like fair to say like if that's happening in the US the rest of the country kind of largely will have similar themes. Right. Whether because it's a different, you know, flavor reaction of it but, but it's similar, similar kind of ideas. Okay.
[00:27:16] Speaker B: So I think yeah.
[00:27:17] Speaker A: Thought exercise for, for both of us.
We do not currently have a free tier but I don't want to do it.
One of our competitors does so, so there, there is currently a, an entirely free podcast hosting platform used to be called Anchor, owned by Spotify now and one of our competitors called Buzzsprout Has a, it's a weird like rotating usage based trial. Like they basically just keep the most recent three episodes and they get rid of everything else. That's their free plan. Weird.
But I'm, I'm sitting here saying like, okay, we kind of like you, we have hard costs, but we kind of know what those are. Could we, could we design a free tier that is limited? I think support is one of the biggest concerns we have. So we probably wouldn't allow people to integrate to WordPress because that's 80% of our support burden.
But could we somehow lean into this cost concern, offer a limited free plan that is essentially our cost to acquire a customer? What our hard costs would be, Are.
[00:28:26] Speaker B: Your hard costs actually hard costs or are they hard costs just mostly support?
I know you've got bandwidth, but is that it? You know, like the, the reason, the reason I asked is because I've got email costs, right? And when I, when I was doing, up until a year ago, I thought those were hard costs for me and then I started running my own email service and then now I don't have those hard costs.
And so I know you've got bandwidth costs, but it's kind of like, well, what if those didn't exist? And like, how could you at least minimize them or reduce them? I don't know. They're like technical. Are they technical? Could you turn that into a technical challenge? Get your costs as low as possible and, and then it becomes, then it becomes a possibility and then you also have to stack on like, all right, well there's going to be a support burden, which is my biggest fear. Like I don't, I don't want to offer a free tier and have my discord flooded with, you know, just very low quality stuff and take, you know, kill the vibes. But it's like, all right, well they're kind constraints that you can apply to those free users. That means they don't actually ever interact with support. And if they want support, you charge for ala, Azure, aws, all that. That's why they do it, right?
If you want to talk to someone, you got to pay. So yeah, I don't know.
How would you do it? Is that a possibility to reduce costs?
[00:29:57] Speaker A: So I think we could. Yeah, totally. I mean, so our object storage is on backblaze, Cloudflare is our CD and AWS is kind of our servers and database and stuff. So like that would need to get better.
I know we've briefly looked at can we build our own cdn? Can we have our own Hardware and all this kind of stuff. I think at our scale, from every one of our developers that I've talked to, it doesn't make sense yet. I think what I would do is I would just try free. If it works in converting customers and they stick around for a while, then you would solve the cost problem. But. But I wouldn't solve the cost problem by building our own CDN or something ahead of figuring out if it works. That's kind of like premature optimization.
The biggest thing I worry about, yeah, the biggest thing I worry about is like, are they just going to be low quality customers? Because like, if someone comes for free, we're like at the higher end of our market right now from a price perspective.
And I know there are lower price providers in our space that have much higher churn because they're attracting kind of lower quality hobbyist customers.
So that's my biggest concern. But it is definitely something I've thought about from a growth perspective.
[00:31:15] Speaker B: In terms of your customer, I guess, deal flow, is that predominantly people migrating or is that predominantly people that are starting and they just happen to get bigger? What's the, hmm. What's the bulk of your revenue coming from?
[00:31:27] Speaker A: So it's about 80% are new podcasts.
[00:31:31] Speaker B: 80% of new podcasts. Which, which. The free thing would make sense in that, in that regard, right? Like, unlike Bento, where it's like all of our revenue comes from migrators. Like the. Oh, really, the 30. Yeah, the $30 plans don't. It's very, it's. It's pretty rare. People like get significantly larger. Like I can name a handful of customers that went from a 30 plan to like a $500 a month plan. But all of our revenues like moving from Klavi, moving from mailchimp, moving from customer IO, moving from this, moving from that. So.
[00:32:01] Speaker A: Oh, interesting.
[00:32:02] Speaker B: It's very different. It's very different to you, I think. I think someone signs up, they start a podcast and well, it took off. So now, now they need that history. Now, now they need all that. Which you said you're like Buzzsprout had like that, that like limited history kind of thing, which I guess kind of plays into that. Right? Like you, you. It actually makes a lot of sense in that context. So it's like you start a podcast, you do. No, no, it's not for me. You're banned. They're dead to you anyway. Right. But if they get to podcast five, they probably want 1, 2, 3 and 4 to still be there. And they're probably willing to pay there. So it actually kind of makes, makes, makes a lot of sense. Not weird that I said it was weird before. It's not weird. It actually makes a lot.
[00:32:43] Speaker A: Yeah, no, I mean I think it's. I just have never heard another thing like that. Like you, you see, you know like Wistia has just a usage limited trial. Like first five videos, free, first three videos three. But not if you publish a fourth one. The first goes away. You know, like a first and first out kind of thing.
So interesting that you get a lot of customers from competitors. Are you all like you mentioned, like you're doing kind of switching from X kind of campaigns. Are you doing anything like proactively to reach out to those folks or is it just kind of like word of mouth and organic stuff to attract them?
[00:33:21] Speaker B: Yeah, email marketing is kind of like interesting, which is email in general. It's like, it's very sticky. And so people need to have a moment in their lives where they have extreme frustration.
And then when they hit that and like that frustration could be like they log into ActiveCampaign, they go to the automation and build and they go, it's so slow. Why is this always so slow? And they're clicking around and they're like, this sucks. This is, this is bad software. And then they go, hey, like I saw Jesse on Twitter or I heard Bento on you know, the mostly technical podcast as an ad or I saw whatever it is once they hit that pain, they then their brain switches to what are the alternatives? And my only job is to be in that alternative category in their brain. And so we, we created like a Laravel integration like this year. And then I basically sponsor Laravel things and then Laravel customers know that we're an option for them. And then that's kind of like that's all they really do for marketing. Same with like WordPress I've sponsored, we did a WordPress plugin, we upgraded it, we made it nice. It's very hard to support like as you know, but I just sponsored some WordPress people and as you get more and more it kind of compounds, right? And then yeah, you get like a WordPress influencer. And then they say like, you know, their followers that are agencies or developers go oh, what's such and such using? And then they look into it and they start using it too. So that's kind of like how we do it. It's organic, but I just try and like plant seeds in places. So either that's sponsorships or ads or talking to people or following people and engaging. It's, it's, yeah, it's not, it's not too complex.
[00:35:05] Speaker A: So to me, Lara, like sponsoring Laravel is a bit separated from who I imagined your ideal customer to be. So Laravel, I just recently. Okay.
[00:35:17] Speaker B: Yeah, okay.
[00:35:18] Speaker A: But to me, like your customers are, you know, digital marketing folks, not developers.
Is that like they're running an E commerce store, they're running a digital product company or they're running a SaaS. I guess it would be yours.
[00:35:32] Speaker B: So it's like. Yeah, it's, it's, it's kind of more. If people predominantly sell things online, they can use Bento and, and it really is that broad, right? Like you sell software, you can use Bento.
The E commerce store that uses Shopify, they sell stuff online. They can use Bento to sell more of that stuff or send their emails. Digital products business that's selling educational PDFs on WordPress, they can also use Bento to send emails and earn some more revenue and stuff. So it's, it's, it's pretty, it's pretty broad. Like, like we've got like a, they got like a exact match domain so I can't really like mention them without asking. But like they do like surveys, large scale surveys. Right.
And they use Bender to send their daily kind of survey emails to like millions of people. So it's, it's, it really is kind of all over the place.
But that's going to be true with like any ESP software, any email service provider. Like they really are serving everyone.
And then mostly your marketing is kind of just funneling in those pools of people. And each ESP tends to be a better fit for certain businesses. And so activecampaign is really good for real estate agents and people maybe 10 years ago.
Mailchimp is really good for someone that just started their business on Wix or WordPress or somewhere where there's a first party integration with that and they're just sending out their basic stuff. But then once they want to get a little bit more complex or they've got a very large list that suddenly paint like mailchimp is more expensive than Bento now. Much to my surprise. Well, yeah, much to my surprise, it's like more expensive than Bento. So people save costs and get a little bit more advanced features coming to us. Yeah, so yeah, it's, it's, it's pretty, it's pretty broad, man. It's a pretty broad range of customs.
[00:37:25] Speaker A: You know, so we are too, we're, we're horizontal, we're not podcast hosting for anybody. It's for. It's for everybody, and I quite like it. Like, we. We have looked at niching down vertically a few times, but. But choose not to. And. And like, kind of was solidified by like, a chat was having with Laura Roeder. Do you know Laura?
[00:37:45] Speaker B: Yeah. I. I don't know personally, but I forget her stuff since. Yeah. Like, I meet Edgar was like, a big inspiration for me. Yeah. And I used it. I was a customer.
[00:37:54] Speaker A: Okay.
[00:37:55] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:37:55] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:37:55] Speaker B: So.
[00:37:56] Speaker A: So she was kind of like, you know, you can. You can niche down, like, by Persona or you can niche down functionally. And so that's like what we. That's what we're looking at now is like, podcast hosting to make you money. Right. So, like, monetization is the. Is the kind of angle that we're. That we're leaning into. Because, yeah, like, that can mean a bunch of. That could be real estate folks that can be, you know, the guy. The D and D guy. Right. That can be, you know, kind of whoever. I like that better because it always seemed like, oh, gosh, podcast hosting for coaches and consultants was, like, unnecessarily limiting us. And it, like, functionally it's not. Right. It's not podcast hosting for coaches and consults. It's like, literally, you know, for. For anybody. So it just didn't make a whole lot of sense to me. But I like functionally leaning into it.
[00:38:43] Speaker B: I think for you and me, though, we're both kind of building utility tools, right. Like, at the end of the day, Bento sends emails and, like, customs is a utility, your podcast hosting. And it's kind of up to the customer how they're going to use that tool, whether they're going to use it as a internal podcasting tool, or they're going to use it as, like a external marketing thing, or they're going to use it, like, whatever it is. Right. But we are actually selling like, a hammer, and there's many different customers of a hammer. And I think there are definitely some tools where. Yeah, sure. Like, I think of a Zenmaid with Amar, where he's doing appointment scheduling and stuff for maids. Yes. Like, and he's very good at it. And it's a. It's an amazing business. I caught up with him in Tokyo. He's a great dude. And with. With that business. Yeah, niching matters. Right. But then I actually see him recently going against, like, another competitor on Twitter. He's just like, you know, going at him and that one broadly markets. So it's appointment scheduling, but it's like a more broader scope of, of who they're going after. And I think that company captures maids a little bit and I think maybe even he's starting to think maybe I go a little bit broader. So yeah, I think there is general advice in like SaaS that yeah, you should go after like a specific niche and all that. But I think you've got to work out like, what is my product actually? Like, am I really just serving this market? Am I just serving agency owners? Is it hyper opinionated software? If it's not hyper opinionated software, then you're a utility and then you have to go broad and you've got to make sure that your software does better at almost being like simpler, easier to use for like a large amount of people, which you and I, I think have have to do. So yeah, I think a lot of people get confused. Am I utility or not?
[00:40:23] Speaker A: It's interesting. Another way we have talked about it is there are tools that you want to spend time in and there are tools that you don't want to spend time in. Right? So like maybe an email tool. I don't know which one you guys are, but like a CRM to me is a classic. Like you want to spend time in there. Like I need to spend time in notion every day doing stuff.
Our customers don't want to spend time in our product. They want to upload an episode and it go out and the next week they come and look at their analytics maybe and like they just want it to be totally transparent in between then. And I think that's just knowing which one of those you are is is interesting like how kind of in your customer's face you want to be or like you kind of position yourself is is an interesting thing to think about. You guys probably want your customers in the tool all the time, right? Like, do you think about that?
[00:41:11] Speaker B: Yeah, there's like. But there's different, different customers have different needs. So it's like broadcast product. We have daily senders, weekly senders. And if that process isn't. Doesn't feel good, then that's not good.
And there's lots of little stuff. Like when you send a broadcast, you're emailing often all your customers, right? And if a broadcast is wrong, then or there's a broken link or something, there's like extreme pain. And so with that, like I focused a lot on trying to make all right like for that person that's any broadcast, how do I make it least painful for them? So we've got like a batching feature. So you can say, hey, I got a list of 100k I'm going to send to a thousand people an hour. It's going to go over a few days, but who cares? At any point in time, you can pause the broadcast and edit it and then resume it later. Right. So that takes out all the stress of all my large senders. So that's for that product. But then if I've got someone that they're like an E commerce store, they set up their automations, they hate marketing, sending broadcasts, then they basically set up their flows and never log into the product again.
So. Or is it SaaS? It's like they listen to a podcast ago, I should be doing more email marketing. They sign up to Bento, they set up their automations for onboarding. Right. Five emails and like, let it. Yeah, they just let it rip. So it depends on the segment of who are the daily users and who are the, like, annual users. And both get value out of the product and both can find a return. It's just. Yeah, it's different.
[00:42:31] Speaker A: Yeah. It's refreshing to hear you so kind of open and unopinionated about kind of how people use your tool because, yeah, like, I don't hear that a lot. You know, it's. You need to be vertical, integrated, opinionated kind of software. And. Yeah, I just don't think all of us need to be so giving everybody who's listening, you know, grace to just kind of let it go, I guess.
[00:42:55] Speaker B: Yeah. But I also think it's like, you need. I really enjoy having a connection with my customers. Like, I've got the Discord server, I've got customers that are in there. I'm really intimately involved in seeing how people use my software. And I see. And I think a lot of founders don't actually know how people are really using their software because they're not really talking to them or they don't have like a constant pulse on that. They just kind of. They're looking at logs. They're maybe doing some SQL lookups. You know, it's like, oh, how many, you know, broadcasts were created in the last. Like, they're not, they're not talking to customers. They don't know that, you know, Sally is stressed at her job sending these broadcasts to 500,000 people every week. And then when you drill in, like, why, why are you anxious about that? Then you can build pretty cool features to resolve that for them. And then everyone else, everyone else benefits from that. But I think you need to. Yeah. Have pretty intimate conversations with your customers to work out, like, what they actually need. And. And it's a fun way to build.
[00:43:51] Speaker A: Yeah. Yeah. I think that's a cool place to wrap because, like, one thing taking us all the way back to the AI thing, one thing I'm hearing over and over from very smart people is, like, the moat for a lot of businesses is community and brand. And, you know, I. I don't do discord, so maybe I would check out your Discord server, but. But I just. I can't.
But, yeah, like, I think it's a good thing for us all to think about is, like, how are you forging connection and community with your customers and people in your industry?
Because, yeah, like, product is easier than ever. Marketing is easier than ever. AI is breaking down the barriers to all of these things, to where, like, the connection we have with our audience or our customers or our, like, customer base is. Is, like, so important.
[00:44:38] Speaker B: Yeah, No, I agree. At the end of the day, we're all just building crud apps, so it's really just the branding community that differentiates it, and it just becomes more true now than ever.
[00:44:48] Speaker A: We're a giant S3 bucket. That's. That's all we are, basically. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Cool, man. Well, it was. It was good to catch up. Bentonow.com folks who want to kind of check you guys out.
[00:45:00] Speaker B: Yeah, man, this is really enjoyable. This is really, really fun.
[00:45:02] Speaker A: Yeah. Thank you. Thank you.
