How I went from $0 to $1M in 12 months

how long did it take for you to get to one million in revenue took about about a year to get our first million i copied step my step what you did could i do the same i think most people could replicate the same strategy that we used i feel like got ka rude where to know why i could be what i want to from at all in in like a days off on a roll less tyler what's up man how are you what up how's did you see the youtuber i think his name is lab coats who copied he figured out the coke formula from scratch after two years of testing did you see this no no okay so the coke formula the the the flavor for coca cola is top secret there's like i don't know a a handful of people in the world who have ever known it at coke they never patent it because if you patent it you publish it and then other people can clone it and so this youtuber after two years of scientific testing flavor testing made a chemically identical formula for coke so he literally like got it exactly right and people are worried for this guy they're like dude you know you need security you know coke coke does not take this lightly but it's a pretty remarkable thing and i feel like what you're giving us right now is the sauce just like that it's like brick by brick way that you can build you know that get that forget those first hundred users then there's first thousand users then that first ten thousand of revenue and get to the first million of revenue and then now you're at thirty million of revenue and i'm kinda wondering if we can kind remix what you did how long did it take for you to get to one million in revenue took a about about a year to get our first million okay so took you a year to get to a million in revenue by year two where were you at about five million in revenue so five in year two and now where are you we just did about thirty million dollars in revenue last year which was our fourth year business yeah your growth is bananas and you you know you're one of the investor updates that i like to open up but what i thought would be cool and we were talking we were like would be fun to talk about here really i think it's about growth i have this book that's on my books shelf called steel like an artist and this book is basically about how most of what we think is original is this is a remix or a straight up copy of something that came before it and i feel like you your story kinda like that you were at morning brew and you may you help make morning brew the fastest growing newsletter and you know it got to seventy five million in revenue and it exited and all this good stuff you took kind of like the learnings from that you remix it into a product so that anybody could grow their product and i'm kinda wondering if we can kind remix what you did and see if we can extract the basic principles so that anybody who's out there trying to you know get to that first million in revenue can copy what you did so i want you to walk me through what did you do to grow and not like the high level like build a great product but like the real the real shit the specific stuff that actually worked yeah let's get into it what was the first thing that worked you're ground zero you have no customers no revenue how did you get going yeah i actually think you already hit on it a bit of like i think about founder market fit a lot in the morning bruce story of actually and you've talked about this before of taking something you did at a company or something you've learned previously become an expert in a low risk way as an employee and then apply those learnings to start a new business i think in in the founders that i've backed and seem it become extremely successful there's typically a through line between them doing that previously and then launching again a quick story that i that i've never actually told before is while i was at morning brew crypto between twenty seventeen and twenty twenty was the biggest thing ever i didn't even own any bitcoin i had no business starting a crypto business but i wanted i was like a founder i wanted to get into crypto and so i found this like a open source library of like a three d model of like a cold storage wallet i i went to found someone in china who can make them bought a thousand of them shipped them to new york and then like on day two started just trying to sell cold storage crypto wallets no i'm the crypto guy and i i didn't know a single person who owned bitcoin i didn't know crypto at all wasn't in any discord channels like the point of that story is like i thought i could will myself in into being a founder in this space that i had no credibility whatsoever i had no connections i just wanted to be a crypto guy lesson learned i sold three of those and i still have nine hundred ninety seven in my basement at my house in complete contrast to that what you alluded to at the morning bruce story like when i joined morning brew as the second employee i had built the referral program i had built the growth mechanisms i've seen what success looks like from the inside of that business and morning brew became this golden child of the newsletter ecosystem and as newsletters became more and more popular i became like the newsletter person out of experience credibility so i preface all of that is like what is the first step there one was like actually just having the experience at morning brew and being able to lean in that credibility of i have done this before and now i'm building something that i think we could quote unquote democrat access to the same tools that morning brew had right right so you you needed a story at the beginning i was given a talk and i call this the marketing kill shop so some guy stood up and he i go tell me about your business and he says we're a marketing age we're marketing agency four cp g companies usually d cp i'm my brother this guys just on alphabet at soup at me and then he goes you know we help with copywriting packaging design you name it we could do it we do everything and i was like okay so you threw an you know threw six acronyms at me and then said we do everything alright i said let me let me ask you this when you're pitching your company who you trying to get on board right and some new brand you want to work with you and i said if you couldn't tell me all that junk and you only could say one sentence but off that one sentence i had to want to work with you what would that be and he started with we do like marketing for consumer companies and i was like cool you and any you and a thousand other companies out there that did that didn't do it for me and i go what's the most impressive thing you've done and he goes well we helped launch and then he named like i did a pop like like huge consumer brand we did all the all the pop initial branding marketing positioning and i go why didn't you say that because that's the kill shot if i'm a new consumer brand and i meet you and and all you say is we we help brands like poppy launch with their packaging their positioning and their copywriting and then i'm like oh i wanna be like them so i'm gonna work with you it's a immediate credibility and proof that no general marketing claim could ever touch and i feel like credibility and proof is so massively underrated and i like this forcing function of coming up with your kill shot so for you i think one of the the story the kill shot is i ran growth for the for the fastest growing newsletter in the world now i'm building a tool for you to for you to grow your newsletter sign me up right and so that's a very very powerful story now somebody listening might be like well but i didn't do that and so you're what your offering is two things one is first go get credibility and track record in a low cost low stakes way like go join a a a fast growing company go join a company that has high potential and go kick ass there that's one path but i do think fundamentally like a story can work so for example if you didn't say that you worked at morning brew but you said i spent a thousand hours studying how morning b grew and all these tools they built internally and i built them now so that anybody can use them that would also work right like you know you could just create so i think it all starts with story and story is so underrated and so how did that story work for what did you actually do with that story to get the word out there yeah and and whether you raise capital or go at it bootstrap i i think it's important to know like in the early days all you really have is that story right like when i'm pitching investors it is i did this at morning i believe i can do it again and do it for more people storytelling i think is the biggest asset as a founder especially in the early days because that's before revenue before customers before attraction i've talked before about the way that i know how to make money about a build of money making skill about how to leverage your time and energy and the team at hubspot actually went through the video where i explained all that and turn it into a free downloadable cheat sheet on my four rules of how to make money now this is not you know get a quick advice it's just core principles foundational principles about building wealth things that i wish i knew when i was you know just getting started and so if you wanna download it it's in the description below it's totally free you can go get it thanks to the folks at helps hubspot for doing the research making this document and make it available to all you guys alright back to the episode can i tell you the story i used to grow my newsletter so after you launch behalf i launched a company and it was called milk road and mil road story is very simple i was very interesting crypto i had been for a number of years and so i created i wanted to create the crypto the best crypto newsletter in the world and in one year we grew to the biggest crypto newsletter in the world and we sold four millions of dollars okay so this is great success story probably the easiest and fastest business i ever built and i needed a story to start it and so i started manufacturing stories one of them was like anti credibility so i told the story how i said can i tell you about the stupidest moment of my entire career and people will lean into that story okay you're gonna tell me about this huge mistake you made i said this mistake cost me more money than every failed investment ever had than every failed company ever had you're like how could you how could this cost you more money and i said it was twenty seventeen my technical c founder the smartest guy i know was supposed to come into a meeting and i was like hey man on the meeting started five minutes ago and he goes hang on i'm just i i gotta buy this and i go by what what are you hey on ebay what are you doing and he was buying the ethereum pre sale so this the ethereum but you know back when it was like i think it's out seventeen cents or something was the was the pre sale and i should've have leaned in and been like why is the smartest guy no the most technical guy know have to go sign up to buy this crypto token i shoulda have leaned in instead i was like if ethereum weird name dude come on we gotta go let's go do some real business over here in this meeting room of course you know he made hundreds of millions of dollars off that and i made z and i basically vowed to not make that mistake again that i that when there's an explosive new industry where there's lots of growth potential that i might start as a dumbest guy in the room but i'm gonna ask a lot of questions i'm gonna learn really fast and i'm gonna figure things out for me as a non technical person well guess what that's what the milk cr was as a newsletter and so i told that story of almost anti credibility as the opening as the gateway to get people interested in my new thing yeah i mean i could've have used that back when i was starting my crypto company and sold three of my cold storage wallets but yeah a hundred percent so yeah i i think credibility is huge the other thing and that it's like the the greatest thing about being online and and creating content is like you can find people who are interested in the same things that you are and so as i'm doing this like year building behind as like a side project on nights and weekends i'm on twitter just connecting with everyone who has a newsletter whether they are no newsletter whether they're up and coming whether they or a writer and operator and i'm trying to understand what are the pain points that they're experiencing so i'm doing consumer research essentially just using twitter it is hey i'm using subs but it doesn't let me customize x y z or they don't have a referral program like morning brew has which who came like one of our big like value props in the early days and i'm basically as i'm building with my c cofounder kind of lurking on twitter trying to see and connect with people in the industry and i think that's incredibly important because when you fast forward to like how do you get your first users the in complete contrast to me not knowing a single person in crypto because of the credibility i built at morning bureau and because of the people i've been connecting with for the past year on twitter i already had hundreds of people who i knew had a newsletter and i know what their newsletter is about what they're interested in what their pain points are and that became like the initial early outreach so like early days i i think that's like an underrated aspect of just getting around and and surrounding yourself with those types of people or you just call emailing dm what were you doing to get in touch with those people so let's say how many people roughly do you think you kind of talked to is it like fifty is it a hundred is it two hundred or something in that order of magnitude right directly in a few hundred okay couple hundred and how did you get in touch with those couple hundred core people yeah either reputation because you see that that they are you can just search newsletter it right and just see everyone who's talking about or promoting their newsletter on twitter i'd follow them and kind of see their story so dms primarily and then what i eventually did and like as we approaching launch for bi i was never a content creator i had five thousand followers on twitter so i think when you're like giving tactics of how to scale your business everyone always looks through like oh but i don't live in new york and i don't have that network or i don't have tens of thousands of followers on on twitter and linkedin at the time had five thousand followers i was not big by any means but i posted a tweet sharing what we had been building i i talk about that we have this waitlist list limited time only complete lie right like we had zero people in this wait list but you you tried to build some jersey like i call out that there's only a few spots for remaining obviously there's a unlimited spots for remaining i started like from studying the people in the industry i already kind of understand where the frustration points are with other competitors right like what are people who have a newsletter who's my target customer what are they already complaining about on social bet they can't do with their current solution and so i work that into the narrative it's we have a custom website builder subs takes a cut of revenue we won't do that we are totally like writer and creator friendly and so you start to work on your counter positioning and narrative and then comes the credibility of oh and i built this at morning group and giving you access the exact same tools that morning brew had do you wanna sign up okay not a large content creator got four hundred people to submit on this waitlist list and and that really became like my my lead list of being able to go out and target these people so if we break that down so step one was story either a story of credibility or almost anti credibility pain point right the problem you had a failure you had and that's what drove you to to get smart about you know not making that mistake again or fixing the problem okay so story was component one component two you said was you went and talked to a couple hundred people who were potential customers before before and during it while you were building kinda nights and weekends and that gave you it sounds like almost like a politician gets talking points we don't take a cut was kinda like your no tax on tips it's like what are the what are the three or four messages that seem to always get people to nod and eyes light up and cool i know when i go out there talking about our thing you know in three months i'm gonna stack those messages one after another so i get nod nod nod okay i gotta check this thing out yeah no hundred percent it's doing customer research and and really just leaning into to where your customers are understanding that story and narrative and then three was the false urgency the false scarcity so saying waitlist list few spots left limited time you know who wants it then you're gonna get the early adopter types the type of people you want early on they like trying new products they're okay with things that are perfect they love to give feedback they're enthusiastic they share once they find something cool and so they you know that's that's what they want and so what was the result of that waitlist yeah so we had about four hundred people sign up initially and in the questions that we asked one of the questions was why are you interested in using bee hyphen so they are basically on a own a silver platter serving exactly what entries them whether it's limitation with their previous platform or they love the morning through whatever it is and so now as a team of three i have this four hundred person list that i can go after i have their email i have their social handle and i'm just like you know it's like the paul graham essay of do things that don't scale like it's the non sexy things at the beginning everyone glam the oh zero to a million in my first week of business and now there's these ai companies that have like that straight vertical revenue i think the the truth is for most of these startups ups getting off the ground it's a lot of like the dirty gritty work of just doing the cold outreach yourself and also like one thing that i've always found a competitive advantages is it's almost like people like try to go too close to the let me automate everything build like this fifteen step automation funnel will use ai to make sure that the messaging hits at the right time to the right person i i didn't use hub spot i couldn't afford it at the time i was just doing cold outreach an email once a week every week to all four hundred people and i got twenty five percent of the people convert and make the first few months wow and so this year's thing you're showing here is literally the the back end of the form they filled out and the most important one is basically like what got you interested in checking this out which is kinda you're were basically trying to figure out what's the burning itch for you but if i was gonna sell you how would you like me to sell you this was my crm yeah it's an underrated question you know in in our sales whenever i try to help our sales team in in one of our companies it's always dude you gotta ask you know what what makes us a win for you like they just sit there and the sales guys wanna tell them all about us and our pricing and our packages and our features and our benefits and i'm like dude you don't even know what they want do you have no idea what their dream outcome is from this entire interaction and as i said just ask them what what would make this a huge win for you you start with that right or you're like you know hey i know you're a busy guy but you you know you wanna you you booked a demo or you wanted to to check out what we're doing i'm curious what's the what's the pain you know what what made you wanna do that because i know you wouldn't just you're not just kicking tires for no reason you kinda set them up with a reputation you're a busy guy you don't waste time there must be a reason that you're here why did you walk through our door tell me the problem and then i know exactly how to sell you right if we're a fit for what you do and i think that people don't really use those two kind of core discovery questions to get that is that kinda how you felt as you were asking these questions and and sort of like were there features that came out of this or marketing messages that came out of this yeah and so a lot of the the feature and and kind of like research was done in this like prior stage but you kind of as you alluded to earlier you figure out the messaging points that really resonate whether it's the we don't take a cut of your revenue that's your revenue we don't touch that back when i was at morning drew the first project i ever built was i built the referral program we saw the scam they were taking off they had this massive referral program everyone was raving about it and austin reeves comes to me he's like we're gonna copy them and do it better than they do so i even know a full time employee on contract i built this referral program we refined it a million times over and it was a massive success it led to over a million subscribers wow that's a huge number huge and and people would reach out and i kid you not maybe a thousand a week would reply to the email and be like how did you build this referral program like how where you what software are you using like how were you able to build this because i wanna do it for my newsletter and these were independent journalists writers they worked at another company but that was the signal of like oh shit what we built that morning drill was actually valuable because other people who had newsletters wanted what we had and one of the biggest hooks was that referral program and after being asked and forwarded emails hundreds of times through my day at morning i was like you know what i'm just gonna write an article this is like where my building in public started i was like i'm gonna write a medium article and break down exactly the back end of how we built this referral program it got thousands of clap or what whatever medium uses but like that was like the the the signal that i used of like what i had personally built is valuable to other people who want this tech and so like another thing to lean into on these like early stages is like what is that core differentiator a lot of founders like try to run away from competition i think we entered one of the most competitive spaces i i even twenty five competitors that were existent and still exist today that are infinitely bigger than us but what we had is like that case study of i already knew what had worked at morning brew and i had people by the thousands who were using our competitors asking about this like very particular feature so when we launched behalf one of our value props was this referral program the same one that warning brew used the scale to four million readers and get acquired by business insider you get that out of the box for free by signing up for behalf and so that was really like our edge into the market yeah exactly that was your big mac right that's the that's the number one thing on the value meal that that people want i got a couple of kind of related stories because i want people to see this so the first is ryan hoover from product hunt did this a long time ago i think product hunt now is probably a little underrated but there was a time about ten years ago where product hunt was the shit it was the number one most talked about favorite product in silicon valley was like your favorite founder favorite founder was ryan hoover and one of the things he did to get off grinding no marketing budget but he realized really quickly there's only so many times people are gonna care to hear about product time because that's about us but if i make it about you and what he was he went to fast company and if you go look at fast company he says how we got a first two thousand users doing things that don't scale you need a crowd to launch to here's how we got one he doesn't even tell you what his company is he doesn't tell you what his product is but he went and he wrote this guest post there about the crappy do things that don't scale it's literally the same thing he was looking for anybody who was launching a product he would go personal email or dm that founder be like hey this is really cool i just downloaded it it looks awesome you know you should consider putting this on product hunt because there's a community of people who like discovering your products there and then when he would go there then he would re tweet what they're doing and he created this thing and he used to go to phil coffee every day six am and his work looked completely unproductive he was just on twitter he's just emailing cold billing random people but that's what it took to build that initial user base and he was religious about it and so i saw him do that that reminds me of what you know what you're doing the second example it comes from emmett at twitch so when we got acquired by twitch emmett who's the founder now we're probably whatever twelve thirteen fourteen years into the company's existence you know the company was big now it had whatever was like the fourth most traffic side on the internet it was you know two thousand employees but i asked him i said what did you do in those first you know three to six months to get to make twitch work and he goes what i did was i went and i talked to a hundred streamers that were on other platforms we were new and there's you know other platforms out there and i interviewed a hundred of them and i and emmett is not the most soc guy so i was like what did you do and you don't strike me as like this ant anthropologists this thoughtful researcher who will observe them and come up with this nuance he goes oh no the interview lasted like seven minutes i only asked the same three questions every single time and i'll send you the google doc of what i asked in all of their replies and so he sent it to me and i read this thing through he always asked three questions so he would say what do he like about your current platform what do you dislike about your current platform and what would it take for you to switch to twitch and most of them didn't it hadn't even considered it but a few people were like you know i do like twitch but the thing that i don't you know that thing that it's missing is x and then he would go build x and he'd go right back to that person and be like hey we built it now that was the thing you said you would switch for like and he's like you know sometimes there was actually two or three objections but they would eventually they would they would just sort of cave to my level of ferocity of how i was approaching this and one of the biggest features that the number one revenue driver for twitch came from those conversations there was one streamer he wanted to get on board and the guy goes i wanna be able to make money and he goes yeah but you have such a small audience dude like your ad revenue will be so small here's no want them to be able to pay me five bucks a month and he goes after you know people don't subscribe to individual creators that's not real it wasn't really a thing at the time and he's like that's not really gonna work for these ten reasons he goes well that's what it'll take so he goes okay i'm gonna build this feature it'll never work but his current platform doesn't have it if i build it he said he didn't move over so he builds it the guy moves over and he goes indeed he wasn't making big money he goes but i got a very valuable insight making any money streaming video games even if it was just five ten seventeen dollars in a month you know their hourly rate was like in the sense that to them felt like there's a path for me here if i just keep going and he goes it was unbelievable i i thought five bucks would never change anything for these people and it immediately changed their behavior and that feature subscriptions today drives like you know probably close to a billion dollars in revenue for them and that was a feature he never would have built had not had those conversations well which is more or less the exact i mean when i'm emailing these four hundred people those conversations are exactly they even though they showed the slightest bit of interest by filling out this google form it is i'm kind of good on my platform and you don't have automations you don't have x you don't have y you don't have z and i think that's like the other trap that a lot of founders fall into it's like the perfection over progress where they see these existing competitors or like the the startups who are already quote unquote successful and they think that they always just like showed up that way right like they they came out of the womb just successful polished like beautiful and and one thing that i've really honed in on is in addition to like the things that don't scale it's like the shipping and being comfortable shipping things that are eighty to ninety percent of the way there that you can get in people's hands to collect their feedback and then iterate as quickly as possible because if this thing's is gonna work out you have to assume that where you are now is the smallest you'll ever be and so to to piss off and have a a less than ideal first impression to your hundred first users is nothing if that means that you can take that feedback from those a hundred people make the product ten times better so the next hundred and the next thousand get a much more polished product but i think so many people get stuck in not wanting to release that un polished un sexy feature until it's exactly right and so like i don't know an an example of like another thing that we did in the early days is that i didn't scale is like email is like right with spam and abuse and there's like security complaints and and and concerns there and when we first launched we couldn't just have anyone sign up and just start blasting out emails right because like we'd be overrun with spam and we could have spent three to four months building this like automated security check which is like was was discussed as an option but that would delay us three to four months and it would take so much time away from building other features that we knew that we already didn't offer and so we actually had the highest friction sign up of all time you would sign up you'd have to submit your name what platform you're using all this other information including the handle to your twitter into your linkedin and you couldn't do anything you couldn't send emails you can use the platform you're like in a brick until i approved you on the back end we had this dashboard where everyone who's signed up to the platform would populate and i would go by a line by line and click on their twitter profile their linkedin profile and try to look up their newsletter to see if they were legit and and manually click a button to say this person is approved and they get an email that they can now use the platform goes against everything in terms of like hyper growth startup right well we're preventing people from using the platform in the ne of security the way that i flip that into a growth thing is when i would go to their twitter profile in their linkedin profile i would follow every single person who signed up for the platform and i would send them a dm being like hey the cofounder founder at at pi thanks so much for signing up here's what we're working on let me know if there's anything i can do to improve your experience and i turned someone who was initially probably pissed off that they couldn't use the platform they signed up to to like wow it's pretty wild that the c founder and ceo just messaged me and follow me on twitter but as i amplify what we're launching whether it's new features our users having success i now have all these people who follow me back as super fans who are now following the journey and engaging with the content so i i think it hits on a few things of like one not letting perfection get in the way of progress and just being okay shipping probably the least optimal sign up flow of all time but also turning into a positive of how can i actually turn this into a growth lever where i can connect with these people have them become fan of what we're building and then now be one of thousands of people following us on this journey right right what's the advantage that's buried inside this disadvantage there's usually one so okay if i'm if i have to manually approve them one by one well i'm more to hear might as well shake their hand might as well say how say hello it might as well connect with them might as get them to follow me because i followed them and then all of a sudden now you have a bit of a relationship with all those early users and and i think again hey the theme seems to be like you know it's hard to build a start up and and the things that don't scale that no one wants to take the time to do in the early days i think are the things that really compound and get you off the ground to get that escape velocity and i think it's actually even that much more impactful later in the company when i'm still doing that four years later and like that is our competitive advantage and and i i read something recently that was in a world where a lot of features are comm it's the stories and the narratives and the people behind the company that actually becomes the competitive advantage and that's like a a early competitive advantage so i think anyone could take advantage of we just had this guy on the podcast tommy mel he's built this billion dollar thing front starting with zero right he was like painting garage doors himself you know day by day and then realized he's painting doors that these other guys installed they're making more money he starts becoming a installer he learns how to be a technician now he's built like one of the biggest ones of the country a one garage and he said he he was telling us what he has his team do and he's like you gotta pet the dog and i i just love this i'm like i feel like i wanna put that on a poster pet the dog he's basically like when you go to their house you don't just go there and you give him a quote and you hand up a bill like no you go there you pet the dog you say hello you smile you make eye contact on the way over he always has them in their script is like hey i'm just picking up a coffee can i get you anything oh don't make me guess tell me what do you you like you know black are you like it with sugar he's like you know we would we we wanna bring them something into the relationship because because it's a i don't wanna i don't wanna just be one vendor you know you're just gonna go for the lowest price like i want you to you know people buy from who they and who they like right and starts with who they even know do they even know you right and so what you're talking about is basically how do you get them to know you how do you get them to like you how do you get them to trust you like before i even used before i invest in behind i was listening to your spotify playlist i don't know if you have that in here as one of your growth acts but you made one of the best work music playlist called big desk energy and i used to listen to that every day and so it was funny like by the time we met i felt like indebted to you and so it was like this little thing that i you know i would have never thought that that would work but it totally worked on me i don't know it i worked on others i i hope so i mean we seem to be doing okay but yeah i think big desk energy might be my greatest accomplishment to date today's episode is brought to you by hubspot did you know that most businesses only use twenty percent of their data that's like reading a book but then tearing out four fifth to the pages point is you miss a lot and unless you're using hubspot the customer platform that gives you access to the data you need to grow your business the insights that are trapped emails call logs transcripts all that unstructured data makes all the difference because when you know more you grow more and so if you wanna read the whole book instead of just reading part of it visit hubspot dot com alright give us give us more of the sauce what's next i'm constantly listening to users and so and and i eventually become a user and i have my own newsletter also called big desk energy on the platform which you should sign up to we entered i guess i'll set the stage we they're twenty five plus current competitors that we entered this space into and when we first launched we had nothing right like you could we we've set up how to send an email two weeks before launch no automations you couldn't customize anything basically table stakes of what you could do on every one of our competitors you cannot do in our platform and so basically what we would decide we would do is we would ship one marketable feature every single week so like we had a core team of engineers our core competitive advantage was going to be product velocity and it was the only option i would i'd be reaching out to all these people on the waitlist list i'd be convincing them to sign up to the platform i do all this hard work to be like bro i i can't do anything on this platform like nothing works and so like from the earliest days i did such a great job selling but the product wasn't caught up to like the expectations of what you were supposed to deliver in this industry and so the what we decided to do out in addition to shipping one marketable feature every single week was we turn each product release into like a moment and so what i mean by that is we would figure out what would be the most useful thing that would prevent churn and that would be flashy enough that when i launched this on twitter and and linkedin that people be like oh one that's super interesting the platform i have doesn't even offer that and when you do it repetitive week after week it becomes more of a narrative of yes maybe they don't offer what i have what i want today but if they're shipping something new every single week it's only a matter of time until they offer exactly what i want and it sounds like you when you said you didn't just say make the product better build features you're you're saying build one marketable feature every week and i like the word marketable there it's reminds me of the amazon work backwards from the press release it at at amazon you don't get to build a feature until you've have written the press release how would we announce this to the press now press release is like this very outdated thing the reality for you is probably like what's the tweet what's the tweet like why are we building this if there's no tweet if if nobody's gonna care when we tweet this why are we building this and that simple forcing function of starting with the tweet and working backwards to do product is going to eliminate like thirty percent of wasted effort just doing you know pet projects or things that sound good on paper to you internally but nobody cares about the users don't care about and and that comes from a place of again like talking to the users from the beginning and and being really indebted into these communities on twitter and like the framework that i would use for prioritizing what to build is like three part framework one is preventing churn in the earliest days we had we had ten users right if one user churn that's ten percent of our revenue so if someone says hey you don't have x and if you don't build x i'm leaving like i can't take that ten percent hit of revenue so that's like top of the line we have to ship that first next is unblock growth so as i'm trying to convince all of these people to leave their perfectly good platform to come to our platform someone might be like you don't offer this feature the thus i can't move over until you have that once i hear that two three four times it becomes a pattern that becomes something that needs to be prioritized to be able to unblock and bring new people into the ecosystem and then the third one is just maximal hype right so some combination of what do i know whether it's the the morning group of referral program or x y z feature when we first launched the ai writer into the editor right it was like at the peak moment it like a year after chat gp like i knew that ai would hit as it does for everything now but some combination of like we don't want the people that we've already worked so hard to get into this platform to leave so anything to prevent that what opens the door and cast a wider net for more people to come into our ecosystem and then like what's that sizzle at the end that we can add that we know that when we tweet it working backwards from the tweet and like the press release that we know will spread because it it solves the problems of the people that we know we want on this platform so that's how we would think about the product release we do a few different things with the product release and this is like probably what we are most well known for today is when we would turn each product release into a moment we have the email that goes to every user and this is coming from a place of insecurity of i wake up every morning in these days and i have you are one of them back when of like hey if you don't shit this like i'm out of here and so the email goes out to all these users threats because one of your early users i don't know what like do you know roughly we were like in the first what we'll we'll call you the first few thousand users yeah and we i remember we needed automations it was like hey when somebody signs up i need to be able to like automatically send them this email first after a day this one after two days and then you know so on see these sequences or whatever and you guys did not have that and we were like yeah we need this and the funny thing is you had pitched us for an investment and i said no i was like i don't know newsletter seems i know isn't that's a solve problem it's kind of a small market how many creators are there gonna be really that create newsletters dumb in retrospect but at the time i didn't understand the market and so we passed but we wanted to be a user i like the product i was like i'm a user about us i don't know how many people are like me out there and then as we're using it and you had this crazy story where your c cofounder passed away your technical founder passed away and we were sitting here badger about features i felt like such a jerk good when you're like hey here's here's why we're just a little slow for this you know the last couple weeks here to getting back to you and then you guys picked up the velocity like crazy after that and i just thought man this guy's a force the nature like if he's gonna do this he's gonna solve our problems this fast in this well i gotta make this bet i actually didn't change my mind about the market at all i was like i still think all those bad things about the market but now i think new things about him that's gonna trump this because i've seen that founders who have that sort of force of will that that that they create the sort of avalanche of momentum whether it's with product or with marketing i don't know they get like many shots on goal it leaves a lot of room for error and you can recover from whatever your shortcomings are you can overcome them that way so that's been one thing and i think you've par laid that with your investor updates the company does well you talk about how the well the company is doing it makes the company do better and then that flywheel and i've always been hesitant to do that because it feels like you're you're exposed your naked you're vulnerable you're putting out your numbers out there for the world to see but you've done this so i guess like show your investor update here and like why does this like does this work and why does this work yeah i mean i mean i'd even take a step back in the sense of like you know building in public i mean everyone talks about it now in twitter and like that's something i've been very ten emotional there's like an altruistic view of it of like entrepreneurship great there's a lot of people who are successful who don't share their secrets of like why they're successful and like that is to the disadvantage of everyone else who wants to build something right and then there's like the more selfish reason of i could tweet and post about newsletters all day long and there's probably a few thousand people who would love that content but if i were to post all day about here's how we hire here's how we built this feature here's the strategy tactic to get us from one million to two million then all of a sudden like the addressable market of that content is ten times bigger it's anyone who wants to build a start up it's anyone who's at a small medium sized business it's anyone who's like an early startup up employee who's thinking about maybe going off on their own and so i made a very intentional decision from the very beginning of i want to share everything that we do the the ups which is you know from zero to a million to one to five in the second year the downs obviously you hit on the the worst moment of the entire journey which is us losing our cofounder and like just all of the different things along the way because again i think people follow people and they want the story and they want the narrative and also if i can turn that into useful tactics that other people could take and use for their business now it becomes someone that they look to and that they trust yeah do you have like data on like how these get forwarded around or how many people sign up from this from the investor updates do you know anything about that or is that do you not try as so the investor update says very clear at the top you're not supposed to forward these people do and maybe it's like it's like private ish right and so yes so they hit on the investor update it's like just whether it started on twitter when i would say here's our first hundred users here's how we got a million dollars eventually i turned that into sending an investor update to all of our initial investors i also have everyone who passed as an investor you were on this list as well yeah i think i gotta a few those and that made me have some lymphoma right exactly so like to me like the ache to your point of like being exposed in naked like yes but that's kind of like where i think i thrive like i want the accountability and i want the press are on that no matter what happened at the end of the month i'm gonna send an investor update to five hundred people who trusted me with their money or past and i don't want them to get the gratification that they were right in passing and i know that we are going to be exposed and share our revenue numbers and i want those numbers to be up into the right and green and so there's like a inspirational like motivational tactic behind it there's also like a very impactful like a lot time is your biggest resource especially as a founder when you're being pulled in a million different directions and like we went down the venture backed route and so as you're building in public and sharing your milestones there's always investors who are reaching out on twitter hey you wanna grab coffee for thirty minutes hey you wanna do this and like my times too valuable to have these coffee meats but i do need to nurture those relationships in some capacity if i do want to raise a later round and so the investor update to me became the greatest life hack of saying like no i'm not gonna spend thirty minutes meeting for coffee but i'll add you to our investor update and you will learn far more about me and the business and how i think about this and how we're growing month over month by reading three to four months of our investor updates than you would ever get in like a thirty minute coffee meet and so by using these investor updates we actually raised our series a in one week it's twelve and a half million dollars in a week i don't know with ai companies maybe that's not as impressive but it was amazing for us love it was there anything else as you were reflecting on what worked how you guys grew to a million that you're like oh i gotta share this this is a good one this one this thing works i mean again it's like the little thing like so we've built into the company that's like very social first culture where everyone is distribution what i mean by that is like when you get hired at our our social media manager shows you how you should use social media and engage with our content and promote different initiatives at the company and so starting from the top of like me actually building in public is like i have this constant stream of of content out about the business we have our employees who we do a few different things internally one every week we have like an award of like he was like we call it the social media girly of the week who's like who was the most active and engaged on socials there's like something like incentive built into that we have a slack channel called pump channel or pump yeah whatever and and the whole purpose of the channel is like anytime that one of our users says something positive about bee whether they're having success they had a milestone it's so much better than their old platform someone sees it drops in that channel now the entire company gets that notification jumps in engages re tweets and likes and so we've been able to build this narrative of one like the early days is like oh everyone seemingly moving to be high because every time that someone says anything remotely nice about us you get a re retreat and like from me and the house account and like fifteen of our other employees and so like a very grassroots method that we've been able to scale now to over a hundred employees in the sense that we utilize every positive thing that we can get and all of the employees that the company to help amplify the different messages yes it's frustrating because everything you said here so far is so simple then when i run back through an audit of stuff that we did in any it any of it my my startup ups i'm like oh yep didn't do that didn't do that yep left that left that low hanging fruit right there didn't didn't grab that either it's annoying but it's also you know of a good reminder a good kick in the butt of like dude stop searching for this the genius strategy stop searching for the one thing that's gonna cure at all and just look for the obvious it's like hey people are saying good things about you and you guys don't even reply do you think they're gonna say another good thing you know you you don't engage you don't spread that that there's this amazing thing but nobody saw it you know you've launched this feature but you didn't think about what the tweet would be in in advance so you kinda spent you know a month on something that nobody really cared about and so everything you're saying is like from the strength from the department of common sense and that's why i love it yeah well which is why i'm always like self conscious and almost like sharing the tactics because like to me at second it's like very like if you wanted to build a business that people love and people love you as like the founder and the person who's building behind it engage with them listen to their complaints build and prioritize things that they want to use on their day to day basis solve their problems when they run into them and it sounds so simple and intuitive but i take a lot of people over complicate the the start up building journey and don't do the little things right we want it to be complicated because if it's complicated and that's why we're not doing it yet because we just didn't know this advanced thing yet but when the answer is you're not doing the obvious simple no brainer brick by brick tactics then you gotta look at the mirror you're the problem right and and it's like don't look at the best investment advice go look go what buffett says you know buffett doesn't open a spreadsheet well but if it doesn't it doesn't do any of that stuff right it's like you know we invest in you know companies that are you know well managed that have a good brand make products that people like have been around for a long time and make you know a healthy profit but not not even too much where they're gouging their customers right it's like stuff that you could fit you know on the back of a cereal box it doesn't take a phd to understand it and yet so few can actually execute it we'll i'll chase the next you know dog coin or whatever you know try trying to do something fancy like you're showing this thing on the screen right now it's literally a little button at the little badge at the bottom of of of the probably the free email here which is like hey this this email newsletter that you just saw this nicely formatted thing powered by bee hyphen right inherent viral vitality in every single email that gets sent out when you're sending how many how many emails are you guys sending a day no idea dave but about three billion a month today okay you're sending three billion a month so you're getting three billion mini billboards at the bottom of those emails saying that these emails are powered by bee high right like that type of stuff adds up it's like the quintessential silicon valley example of hotmail where they had at the bottom bottom of their emails to get your free email at hotmail and they went from tens of users to tens of millions in a few years just from that simple viral alright let's take quick break because i gotta tell you a story let me tell you about the first time i tried to run payroll for my team i was using a traditional bank and you know the type it's got a jan interface it's built like a two thousand and two tax form and it was open only during business hours and i hit send in froze they flagged the transaction they locked my account they put me on hold for forty five minutes and then they told me i gotta visit my local branch and that was the day i started looking for a new bank solution after asking a few founders what they were using i found out about mercury and so now my payroll is two clicks i can wire money i can pay invoices i can reimburse the team all from one clean dashboard that's why use it for all of my companies and so do two hundred thousand other startup founders and so if you're looking to level up your banking head to mercury dot com and apply in minutes mercury is a financial technology company not a bank bank the services are provided through choice financial group call ama man a and evolve bank trust members fdic a leave with one one last thing is like i love the concept of not making people think in the sense that like there's always i mean brandon i'm i just i talked about how high friction the sign up process was but prior to sign up process all of our competitors had this the most complex pricing models you're limited on how many emails you can send per week and contacts you have to like calculate how much volume you're sending per month which no one has any idea how many emails they're sending per month take way too hard to even figure out the the simple question of how much is this going to cost me to use and so when we launch we had an all inclusive every premium feature for ninety nine dollars and you can send unlimited emails in retrospect not the most scalable model and not the most optimal model to make the most amount of money but going back to not letting perfection get in the way of progress i could explain that in a tweet at any time saying for ninety nine dollars unlimited emails every feature you see here and so i'm a big fan of living to fight another day in the sense that a lot of people get handicapped by trying to think of the most optimal solution in the future but if i'm trying to figure out the most scalable pricing model that i can't communicate easily i might not ever live to see that future day because we already shot ourselves in the foot and so i'm i'm a big fan of kinda pushing off some problems to be solved later under the assumption that later will involve us having more money more revenue more people to help us solve that problem in the future yeah you've made it simple and you made it easy and understand even if it's imperfect and not like sort of optimized yet this it reminds me of robinhood robinhood built a hundred billion dollar company off of free trade free trades to commission free trades so don't pay nine ninety nine i remember on the e it was nine ninety nine to just buy and sell a stock and robinhood got rid of that now that's a single sentence right if you trade on robinhood your trades are free they didn't have to figure out you know today they have banking and crypto and they have mortgages and they have personal margin loans and options derivatives in prediction markets and they make tons of money i think they have nine different product lines that do over a hundred million dollars in revenue but the entire empire was built on a simple promise you know free trades right and it tied in with the story the name rob been hood we're letting sort of the little guy win right we're stealing from the rich and you know we're we're enabling the masses here they built the whole thing off of that one simple idea and at the time they'd forced the whole industry to change because the whole industry was based on this you know commissions model and they realized like first of all you don't even make that much money off of the commissions it's not even necessary there's not there's not that big of a cost to doing a trade and i've heard an interview with the guy where he was like because we did it for free we had to innovate on the cost structure to make sure we're not gonna burn too much money doing this whereas these other guys never did anything because they were charging so much they had ninety whatever percent margins on that trading commission so they never cared to figure how to make their trades faster cheaper simpler to to do under the hood we had to because we did free trades and then that enabled the next layer of benefits to the customer and so you know don't underestimate these things you know that's simple that simplicity that anybody can understand don't make the user think too much that simple story can build you know a hundred billion dollar company that that's a goal a hundred billion right i would enjoy that as an investor i would very much enjoy when you guys get to a hundred billion tyler has been funded dude what what i guess what do you wanna leave people with i don't know like getting started is always the hardest part right and i think if if this journey that i've been on if it shows anything it's that i don't have and where i always admire you is like the work smarter not harder approach i think my advantages has always been different right like the the only two things that i can control are my effort and my attitude and so i'm like the brute force so like i'm up at five thirty in the morning i'm at my desk to nine o'clock different than your preferred life but what i do and like what i found has worked best for me is just brute force working hard and and doing the little things right that start to compound over time and there's no secret sauce outside of like the very applicable thing is that anyone could listen to this episode and actually start applying and understanding who their target user is get a md p of v one out start talking to your users figure out where they're dropping off and where you can improve so like getting started i think is it's the biggest thing holding back most founders and just focusing on the little things yeah i love it you probably shared i would say i don't know seven or eight of the little things anyone individually doesn't seem like it's gonna you know beat earth shattering but when you start to stack them up and you take this attitude of i'm just gonna do the obvious common sense positive you know one unit forward type of mentality you can get pretty far i don't know if you've ever read this the story of the south the guys who who conquered the south pole it's one of my favorite stories no you have the story nope alright so back in the day there was like all these like races so there was the world wars and that's where countries competed but in between the world wars there was like oh the north pole which country can get there and it was a sort of like you know a bit of a ego contest between countries and it was pride it was who's the brave who's the fastest who's the strongest who's the smartest and so there was the north pole there was the south pole and there was everest and i'll tell you the south pole story because i think it's pretty crazy so there's these two teams that go down to the south pole and one team basically bets on we're gonna have the strongest animals to pull our sled we're gonna make sure we're fully stocked we're gonna build like really sturdy camps so that we can survive we're gonna take this this known route and they were very smart and strategic so they would when the weather was good they would like gun hall he would give a motivational speech and they were trying to go as many miles as they could and when the weather was bad they would bunker her down and they would wait it out and it seemed like the smart strategic thing to do and so that was one of the guys and then the other guy took the opposite approach she's was like i'm gonna try to go in a straight line that seems like the fastest path we're not gonna bring all those supplies it's gonna be too heavy so we're gonna bring like just what's needed we're gonna use dogs instead of horses yeah they're not as strong but hey we're not bringing so much weight so with these supplies so i think it'll be okay and he took this like absolute brute force mentality and his approach was twenty miles a day so it's like good weather twenty miles bad weather twenty miles it would just march twenty miles on average whereas the other guy had this huge variance in what they would do he was very dependent on the weather the conditions people have taken this lesson and they sort of like you know like a like a moral of the story was this idea of the twenty mile march that you know you could start in new york but if you just take this approach of twenty miles a day of walking it's not an unreasonable amount to walk in a day you can get to california you will be on the beach soon there there will be water in between your toes if you take this twenty mile march idea if you try to like you know sprint some days and rest some days and run some and jog some days and you try to like bring you know you think you need all these resources to get there you'll never make it and so what i love is is to me your story is very much this sort of twenty mile march idea of like you just wake up every day and you just do the next thing you live to fight another day just by doing you know the basics really really well the common sense things really really well alright tyler thanks for coming on everybody should go listen to big desk energy on spotify that's my plug for you great playlist and subscribe to your newsletter because i think your newsletter is pretty fun partly you know your founder stuff how you're building your company it's pretty entertaining read yeah if you liked anything in this episode my newsletters is that pushed out right so subscribe to the newsletter follow the the playlist and thanks for having me alright that's it i feel like i could rule world i know i could be what i want to from at all in in like a days off on a role travel never looking back alright my friends i have a new podcast for you guys to check out it's called content is profit and it's hosted by luis and ph ka after years of building content teams and frameworks for companies like red bull and orange theory fitness luis and fans are on a mission to bridge the gap between content and revenue in each episode you're gonna hear from top entrepreneurs and creators and you're gonna hear him share their secrets and strategies to turn their content into profit so you can check out content is profit wherever you get your podcast