I Sold My Bootstrapped Startup for $10 MILLION

0:00 when I created my first startup that's what I did like I raised money tried to hire the highest number of people that I could and I don't think it worked like that that's TBO Lewis Lucas after his first two Venture back companies failed he bootstrapped his next one to a 10 million doll acquisition but first he changed his approach we had this crazy idea of trying to ship one product per week until something stick he followed one simple rule follow the revenue Revenue was the only metric that we were following to decide if we would continue or shift to another ID he told me why you no longer need to raise money to build SAS best practices for startups looking to partner with creators and

0:45 what types of Moes are still defensible this is tibo Lewis Lucas's founding Journey tibo what's up man thanks for coming on well thank you very much Michael I'm super happy to be here so we've known each other for a while now but I actually just learned this about you when we were doing research for this episode you're not only the king of bootstrapping with a $10 million exit under your belt you've also been a venture back founder twice both companies had some success one g to 500,000 users if I remember correctly and the other got like a licensing deal with Ubisoft and had a bunch of employees what happened there why go bootstrapping yeah but like both of them crashed to tree and that's that's pretty much why I I went to BL stopping and I

1:32 like I wanted to go super lean and like go go back being hands on because I don't feel like I'm a good manager you know and thing is like when you are at like engineering school or business school it's like everyone around you they're telling you like they are looking up to being a project manager being a like the super team manager you have to work on your leadership stuff like that and and so that's that's what you want to do when you get out of school and so when you when I created my first startup that's what I did like I raised money tried to hire the the like the highest number of

2:17 people that I could and and I don't think it worked like that like I you you cannot create a good product with 10 interns ring over after a period of like six months it doesn't work like that what happened like what did you learn from those experiences maybe about yourself about sort of the companies you wanted to build uh that's sort of now taking you on this new path what I learned the most is that when you have a big team you feel awesome at the family dinner saying that you are managing 15 people at work like it it's like it's like you're successful but in the end if you want to reach product Market fit and I think that's the the most difficult thing as a

3:03 founder and and the the one goal that you need to go after if you want to go if you want product Market fit you need to be super handsome like you are the most motivated person you are the the person that can iterate like launch more experiments go fast and and go after specific opportunities that you will see on the markets and and I like right now I'm pretty sure like no one else in the company can do that better than you and so that's that's why I like I totally changed my mindsets when I started this uh third company we did it just at the two of us with micro funder and we had

3:49 this crazy idea of trying to ship one product per week until something stick and it's like it was a nightmare at first but it was the one key process that enabled us to like quickly pivot until something that until we got into something that was truly valuable yeah if memory serves you guys did this for like four months right and there were like I don't know 10 or 11 products and then the last one was tweet Hunter which which took off what did that approach kind of allow you to do differently that led to discovering product Market fit with tweet Hunter unlike the other products when you're building a startup it's easy to get heads down in your work and

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5:20 are trying to reassure yourself with anything that you see so just a few users telling you that your product is awesome it's GNA pump you for weeks and make you want to continue on on this IG products if your mom is going to tell you that your product is awesome like what does she know about your industry what does she know about your products we did that with users like free users free users for our two first startup was way enough for us to make us continue working on on on those IDs and what changed with this one product weak onto something stick is that we were looking at revenue and and revenue only and

6:06 revenue was the only uh metric that we were following to decide if we would continue or shift to another ID and and so we did that like we we even we we even like reached 300 monthly revenue on one product that we killed and moved to something else because we wanted to to hit like this threshold of like 1K in monthly recording Revenue until we really go like all in on on a concept like on an ID why was 1K the magic number I don't know to be honest like I I don't think it was a magic number it was just a strong signal that we would need to like so something that was super

6:51 insightful for us is on twit we were like we were actively posting on reddits posting like tweeting about the process building in public and for sometimes we were just sometimes like not doing anything like for for two or three days because we're building stuff or like just building big features we're not uh doing any promis work and and at those specific times we were noticing that we were still getting new users and still getting freak files and and and this Ty is a huge signal it means that it means that you have people out there who found your product even if you are not actively pushing it that day so that was

7:39 an even better signal for us compared to the revenue we were getting Revenue without pushing it so there was some kind of word of mouth referal uh I don't know something that was working so that that's what made us like go order on that you mentioned building in public and this is something I want to ask you about because you've done this incredibly well both with your own social media accounts with working with creators everything so we're getting the process out there has that changed do do you think the value of that has changed because a couple years ago when you guys were first getting started with tree Hunter building in public was it's not like there was social pressure to do it but it massively benefited you to do it now with all these AI tools out there Building Products can happen a lot

8:25 quicker is a lot easier there's less differentiation based on product and so sharing your secrets putting things out there might actually work against you is that something you're thinking about yeah definitely and I think you you you s it that pretty well like it's the main difference is that when I started building in pu this was like more than 3 years ago breeding was hard like much way harder than it is right now when you think that you can create a full app right now with like so so many Advanced feature and leverage AI on so many things if you are hitting some kind of success it's pretty easy for a newcomer to copy paste your app and set it for like half the price it's very hard to

9:13 like on most on most product is hard to build the modes so if he don't have a mode like why would you build and share all your secrets that's that's a very like that's a strong question I have right now and so I don't have a clear answer on is it worth it the one key thing right now I think is if you are nobody like you don't have an audience you don't have uh any success you don't have a working product well you don't have anything to lose and it can be it can be a great way to start if you have 100K followers it can really works against you because you you are being looked over constantly and every new thing that

9:58 you will share is going to be copied so if you share about them publicly you need to be that comfortable getting 100 C 100 copy cats very fast yeah we've seen some instances of this on on X I think even in the past few months people complaining about it what what do you think Founders should do instead if they do have a big audience or even if they just you know have a decent audience what should they be doing instead of building public what's next for for these types of growth strategies one thing that I think you you are doing and I think you're right is going on on YouTube the value and the engagement that you have there on YouTube might be worth the potential issue of being copy pasted you know the

10:45 more the more engag your audience is the more valuable it is and so it's it's always a balance of how how valuable it is to share about your tips publicly compared to the the price of all those the scopy cats coming yeah the potential downside you mentioned Moes I've been thinking a lot about Moes basically ever since chat GPT came out the end of 2022 what are the Moes today if product can't be a mo where do the modes live both for you know companies that want to get maybe really big but also just for for bootstrappers building building products ic3 three main modes is I think I think the so there's

11:31 data you you often have like a inhouse data that are super valuable and they are much harder to copy than uh the product itself second one would be distribution like you have you have a key distribution channel that you have access to and nobody else having having a YouTube audience is a great example and the third one is I guess users and network effects and you you can see that like the the network effect of X and like Twitter is is super strong like if you are the president of the United States of America or a random CEO you might want to to publish only on the place where most people are listening I

12:17 saw people getting banned and I was like I don't know if this place is for me all time fear right now is getting Bann on on many platforms or well platform risk is real right I mean I think yeah cited that last time we talked actually about like why you decided to sell tweet Hunter right you were like oh well elon's just taken over Twitter then at the time and you're like I don't know what's going to happen to the platform people are leaving is this product that I've put my Blood Sweat and Tears into still going to be as valuable and so that that helped Drive the acquisition decision so I mean yeah platform risk is is real yeah do you know that I my LinkedIn not going got suspended hopefully I'm out of Tapo like my my former LinkedIn product but when I

13:05 got out like in in last April too was 23 of our revenue and so getting a heat on LinkedIn like this I'm so happy that that I sold it would have been a nightmare to manage yeah 100% it's it's tougher to Market that way too if you're not on the platform you're yourself I guess you know looking at it now you know we're a couple years on gone from Elon acquiring Twitter it's now X the platform's going fine it's actually growing any regrets people are fighting for engagement more than other so I wonder like many many people are blaming the new algorithm for some like some some Heats on on their engagements it's super hard to know if lower engagement

13:54 could mean less users or less Bots and maybe before you had engagement from BS or a real algorithm change you know so it's the the truth is we have no idea what's going on there like it's it's a complete blackbox and I don't know if you notice but I'm building a new app for X like after I'm basically trying to do over to that to to redo what I did for tweet huner and so I'm going to get exposed again on on all those things and so like I'm going to I'm going to feel I guess yeah I think they've taken a harder stance against I think third party apps in general since Elon took it over are you worried about you know is you said you've been suspended on

14:39 LinkedIn are you worried about getting suspended on Twitter yeah I am because like LinkedIn for me was this like secondary platform my primary platform has always been X I'm super scared that I could just get ban like this in just in a day and and I couldn't do anything about it but as the game like it's hard to it's easy to complain but without those platforms super hard to grow an app yeah I mean you guys mastered growing on X for tweet Hunter you know you were using so many like micro influencers giving them even equity in twed Hunter to keep promoting the product what was that like because I see a lot more people exploring that now actually to the degree that we're building it into megail is like Creator

15:25 partnership sponsored posts how did you see that so early and sort of how did you approach those creators I think it's it's little bit like um many things in life I was not planning for all that definitely not and the one key thing that started this entire journey is I think we were a little bit above 1K in monthly Revenue I was reaching out to a lot of Twitter creators like I was I was trying to get uh big Twitter creators using twit Ender and one of them got got like this super bosy and weird reaction where he said I want in and I I didn't really understand what it meant but he

16:11 basically wanted to like get into the journey he he wanted to like get at the co-founder level and this guy was GK Molina he was like a growing Creator who was talking about the the exact methodology that we were having with with tweet Hunter like he was he was setting this this concept of having like an inspiration wall like a tweets wall to inspire you on how to write better and from the very beginning it was a strong fit like his audience was the exact audience that we were trying to to reach with Tre so we we found the deal was very generous we gave him until up to like 25% of of twiter and this like it it's it started this all like it it

16:57 started this idea of sharing Equity with people and so we did it again at the much lower scale with like 17 different creators we we gave them 0.1% of of twe Center and we realized that it was it was giving us this huge power like huge we had like 17 big creators strongly incentivized in us growing and and so at every new feature launch at every new things that we were announcing we had this huge pool of people that were pushing us it worked so well but what I meant here is that we didn't plan all this like we were just reacting to people like uh hinting us

17:45 this ID like they were just sharing about they were just pushing in this direction and we just listened and I think I think right now like you have so many things happening it's a real work but that's how it works like you need to just listen to the um listen to the market listen on a just observes start experiments and see what works and just double down on what works and kill what doesn't like relentlessly like kill what doesn't work do not do not like push harder on something that doesn't work yeah I think that's where a lot of people get tripped up they you know maybe they're sentimental maybe they feel like they put effort into something and they have like a they have like an issue letting go of it how do you kind of force yourself as a Founder to just say you know this might be my baby but I

18:31 gotta move on from it you know what like when because I'm saying it it it helps me just remembering it because and I I did this mistake so many times I first TI up that I did I spent two years on this ID whereas it it it should have been three months after after the initial four month the app that we created was not working so we raised money to build a better version of the same app and it was it was such a mistake it was like just so damp and we did it again this year like I wanted to create an app and so we outsourced the development to a developer it like after 3 month it it it was supposed to be a one month project after fre three month the app was not really working like

19:18 obviously there was no no fits between the developer and the and the the ID and the product but we just kept going and we we just we entered into this cycle of let's add two weeks of devopment let's add two weeks and because each time you add two more weeks the amount of money that you spend on this project is growing and so you do not you don't want to waste this money like the the higher the higher the longer you you spend on these projects the higher is the amounts and so the the higher would be the amount that you would lose if you kill the product and so you don't kill it but you have to like kill the projects you mentioned that you have sort of outsourced this to a developer and I

20:04 think you know at least in Silicon Valley there's like strong push back against that idea right early on you're like you have to be in the weeds you have to be writing the code maybe working with AI these days but you know they don't have as much skin in the game as you do at the end of the day what makes it worth it because I've done the same you know I've outsourced stuff to developers it's worked fine what what do you think makes the makes it worth it to do that it doesn't it doesn't work the the only thing that I think that it can work if you are like pressurizing the like you you you give you give like strong package like super high package and you hire a very highly

20:51 talented people that's not what I need or uh you hire someone that is like way uh way more Junior Le less experimented but you are uh super handsome managing the guy and that's not what I did either so what I'm doing right now and I think I'm going to do that only is just Equity partnership like I want I want to work with people who have like strong skin in the game I want to be highly motivated because it's their baby and most of the time I'm going to work on IDs that are not mine because it's it's incredible how like how people are motivated when it's

21:36 their IDs and not yours do you feel I me is this related to what you've been doing I think recently which is you know you've bought some products that already exist like you bought feather you bought type frames obviously you sort of forked type frames we can talk about that but yeah is that sort of that strategy playing itself out yeah exactly the the last one of the is a project called outrank it's outrank doso it's um keyword generation tool plus blog post generation and so it will try to understand your your Niche and will publish one new blog post every day to rank on specific keywords and so the idea is to get traffic on autop privates

22:24 what I did here is I noticed a guy working on on this product on its own and getting some kind of success but like what I mean by here is like three 300 per month in monthly Revenue this is a very nice spot like 300 in monthly Revenue it means that you have something valuable here like it's you have something but it's like it's not shaped in a good way like the the packaging around it is is not is not well I got into this project we made a Equity splits I got hands on together we reshaped the app we Chang many we improved uh generation I got involved into the prompting and and the product

23:09 that we got working is much better right now and and I think it worked very well because the guy that I worked with it was his ID like the foundation ID is it's his so he's super motivated to make it work like we have very strong positioning like I'm focused on distribution he's focused on building it just work like we launched we launched yesterday we got uh 50 new free Tri working we're already at 2K in monthly revenue and I hope to get it like to 5K in a few weeks we see how it's going but it's working 300 a month is not a lot of money right and there's probably a lot of products like a large number of products that are at that level how do you identify a product that early that you know you can get to 5K a

23:57 month or 10K a month or 100K month or Beyond I'm scoring Twitter and honestly like many people are are looking for magic recipe on how to find those but that's my way like I'm seriously scrolling Twitter and trying to notice the the cool stuff that I see it's just that simple and then I engage like I engage talk with people uh ask question ask many many questions that's my way so you basically you trust your intuition to say this looks interesting and then you go deep and ask questions and kind of learn okay how promising is this actually yeah I also think that you need like a PO you need to be a power user of Twitter in the way that you need to set up a few things on Twitter that

24:44 are not there by default otherwise you would just get the like the more viral like the you just get the viral memes of the day on your Tweet feed but if you if you set up like least use my other products Super X and a few a few nice a few other like poor user things yeah you can notice those guy and uh try to engage with them when you are engaging how do you decide how much to invest into these Acquisitions or these Equity Partnerships as you call them and like how do you determine that it's worth doing that in the first place what I'm trying to do every time is trying to

25:29 like have a working version in less than a month of the new vision that we would have together and so it means that in less than a month just by working together would have something to put into the hands of users and that's what we did and so I I um dm'd a few people asking them to just try it and I got some very good feedback and so let's go to phase two phase two is spend another month trying to deliver more value uh dming more people and see if I can get these two a little bit above 1K in revenue and if if I get into this stage Let's uh work on it more and let's launch and that's what I did yesterday the launch has been doing quite okay and

26:17 so I'm going to spend more time and and uh try to get this product to the new stage and it means activating SEO uh looking at uh maybe new acquisition channes and see what I can do here and when you when you actually decide that hey this is a product that has promise that I like working with the founder of and I can see a partnership with them you know if something's doing under a thousand a month in recurring Revenue how much are you investing into the product like how much are you actually putting into it I'm not really putting any re any any money I'm just putting my time I'm putting my time my audience and activating like every every channel that

27:02 I can no it's I don't think it's it's uh bu it at all for both of us what's what change and I think I'm going to I'm going to with this kind of deal only from now on because when you are just just putting money on the table and paying a guy to do the work even if he still has some Equity the H much in the game you have is much lower yeah I agree because you have that that flat amount s of coming out sort of related to this in your newsletter you mentioned that people should buy assets or products rather than buying companies or what did you mean by that I think it's just legal thing I sold my company

27:49 and I saw how complicated it is like it's it's so hard like you have so many so many things to handle like the selling the equity uh paying tax having contracts super Well Suited it's it's so much easier when you restrain the setting to a specific asset and not the company in in in some cases it's not something that you want to do for tax and accountant Rison but if you can I think it's so much simpler yeah I mean when you sold 2800 Tapo they both got sold together I imagine that was under like the company right what was that like what were the pitfalls that you sort of realize you wouldn't

28:35 recommend other people to go through in this case I honestly think that we would not be able to like we would not be able to avoid that like they were it was I think it was the right thing to do I'm I'm not talking about this specific case I'm more in my newsletter when I was talking about uh asset sell instead of Company sell I was I was talking about micro acquisition which we did a lot I think when we were working at twist we acquired more than 10 tools and and people thought that acquiring 10 tools is a hard thing to do it's really nuts when you are talking about 10K USD assets that you just uh you just just basically what what what it means is people think that's super

29:20 long process and super hard to do but basically what we're doing is wiring the guy 5K getting all the assets and wiring 5K more at the end that's that's pretty much that and the contract is less than one page generated by uh gp4 and that's it it's really something that you can do want to get more insights like that each week I actually interview multiple Founders for the ones who don't join the podcast I write up a case study and share it with all founding Journey members I also write weekly tactical deep Dives share startup opportuni unities and analyze trends that I'm noticing we've also got a community of Founders and investor in Pitch te database and more fun stuff like over $6,000 in perks and discounts

30:08 to help you build grow and raise capital for your startup go to join. founding journey.com to get access we've seen the similar thing we've acquired a couple newsletters over the past year and a half or so and it's the same we literally did it in 30 we did one of them in 30 minutes over Twitter DMS on the newsletter front you know you guys you a feather now and another one of my tools tools right you've turned it from a you've turned it into a newsletter tool to compete against you know some of these really big players in the space what's that been like the story is nice because I again I didn't plan this like I it's it's it's been a while that I wanted to acquire feather not to turn it into anything but because I got a lot of

30:54 money from the acquisition of tww and that feather got very Healy metrics like very low turn constant growth and it was very attractive to me I was a user and so I really like the products but during the acquisition process theive uh did this crazy price change and I was just like blown away for me on my particular case I would have to pay two and a half more for the same thing I did so many pricing TW in my life like on tweet I think on tweet Hunter we raised the price five times but every time every single time we were grandf the ring or

31:39 the users meaning that user who joined before would just keep paying the same price and all all the price Incas was like 20% or 30% here is two and a half more it's crazy I was going from 100 per month to 250 per month and so I was thinking that many people would be in the same position as me and so I found this other tool where which were sending newsletter from Nash and so I just reached out to the founder and decided to acquire it as well and so I acquired both those tool

32:26 notion Center and F feather and I merged the capabilities of no and sender into feather and I was super surprised like it it went very well the newsletter feature itself is was very hard do like much harder than I thought uh but once we released it like the the growth of feather kicked in and we got some very nice results so you have a ton of these products now right like we've talked about I think at least four already and I know there are more talked about four four products that are bringing Revenue okay so let's let's talk about those four then so you stated at one point that you had a goal of getting five companies to 100K Mr each over the next

33:12 three years are these four part of that five and I don't know tell me why that isn't an insane idea to try to do five at once because of what we took to together before like because of uh because it's getting way easier to build I want to focus on something that I find very valuable which is uh distribution I want to build a very strong acquisition engine system and and to make it profitable I think it's I think it's worth it to make this engine work on multiple products four is very hard like my I feel right now that I'm having I'm almost at maximum Capa capacity

33:57 uh so getting to five is going to be very hard to uh more than five would be crazy too I do think that by setting the goal of 100K monthly Revenue per project on five projects this is definitely not what's going to happen I hope that maybe two or three are going to be in this range one product probably going to be in the like 10K 20K uh range and I hope that one of them is going to blow up like way like way way above uh this 100K per month I hope that this is what going to happen you know traditional advice would say that

34:42 focusing on one thing is where you make more money in the first place right so when you do have one of these blow up and maybe even exceed hopefully where tweet Hunter and Tapo got to you know are you going to focus down on just that maybe sell off the others or or what's your thought there I have no idea I'm I'm so I'm building every single product with co-founder and so I would not be the only one deciding for sure I love that I love what this guy Andrew wikinson is doing he has like this umbrella company uh with many many different companies and I love to see that you can maybe transition from making one product

35:28 to to building this system of products working together with a nice distribution engine that's what I'm trying to create it it indeed it goes against every single advice that he can see on many places but I want to try and I'm I'm going to I'm pretty sure I'm going to learn a lot along the way from day Zero I've been working on many things at once like even when we're working on twit we had those second product top heel and it's the one that's made the most revenue and it's often the case like you have so many example like a us doing more than Amazon Marketplace you have so many example on on on Earth

36:14 so I want to just try this Andrew Wilkinson is actually a great example with with tiny people call Tiny the the kind of like you know the the the modern or some call it the baby but it's it's at this point pretty big public company but they call it like the baby Brookshire or baby Brookshire hathway do you see AI as having like uniquely enabled that structure to actually be more not just viable but more likely to lead to financial success for somebody than the traditional path of just going all in one thing I don't know maybe the the the thing is I think we have no idea where we are going this like if if you can just prompt to create a software and you have a full sze working from

37:00 just one prompt done in a day like it it means it means so many things like so many things are going to change because of that and so it's very hard to see where value is what's what's left in the work that we are doing right now and so my I don't have answer to to those the only thing that I that I see is that just moving quickly doing things shipping things is I think the only thing that can work so you mentioned that with each of these projects you have a co-founder right exactly one co-founder per project I think you also mentioned earlier in the conversation that you don't want to be the big people manager that's not maybe

37:45 where you're most excited about spending your time does that mean that as these grow it's just going to be a two-person company essentially and is that sort of also uniquely enabled by AI now I think it's true yes so the why I I do like this system is that cofounders don't really mean don't really uh need managing like they are people like me starving for Success uh they want to like grow the products uh and they are just they're growing up and they know where like they they just they don't need me to lead lead them exactly where we should go so we have like we have our own um responsibilities uh I'm

38:33 doing everything I can on the distribution side and I do agree that AI is helping a lot in making us I think we are both worth like 10 people from like five times five years ago so yeah I think we can achieve a lot with AI I want to talk more about co-founder so when you started tweet Hunter right you went back and worked with Tom and Tom was your co-founder actually on the first ureb company how did you know at that point that Tom was the right guy to go back and build with again after having built something that didn't get to where you guys wanted to and similarly how are you kind of evaluating these new co-founders on these new projects I think it was

39:18 almost a perfect fit with Tom because for for a few reason is the first first thing is it's super easy to communicate with him like it's every time we have an issue every time there's something wrong we are both able to communicate frustration or every other feeling that we have it's easy for him and I to say I feel frustrated uh I don't like how this convers this conversation went I feel like my ID got rejected for wrong reason and it's it's very likely that something's going to go wrong at one point with the cofounder and so being able to to share this is is super valuable and at the same time we often

40:04 disagree we have so many like there's so many topics where we disagree with each other but overall we want to go in the same direction and I think that's that's super powerful like you have this Baseline of we communicate on the same way like we speak the same language we we come from pretty much the same background but we have have very different IDs and we have very different skills and mindsets I I want to go very fast I will I will ship first and think later uh I will go quantity over quality but Tom is going to hold me and it's going to force me to deliver higher quality on some topics he's going to tell me on this specific thing you need

40:51 to spend way more time and and make it better and so this super nice complimentary I'm trying like with with my new co-founders on my new products I'm trying to find this and I know that on some products we are weak on some aspects way weaker than when I was working on on Tom it's super super super important for me to like acknowledge this and and work on that because we like obviously Tom and I we know each other for like 10 years and so it was the perfect match yeah what what do you do when you realize that um about you know these new co-founders maybe some of them you guys aren't on exactly the same page or I'm trying to like I'm trying to change my mindsets

41:37 with some of them compared to the other one like because I for like for one of them I know that I need to be the quality guy whereas I was the quantity guy before different versions of TBO yeah trying to it's not working yet so we'll see and any tips for other Founders who you know are on the same page or maybe they're seeing things differently than than their co-founder I think like the the one thing that I would advise is if you have a latent problem if you have an issue and like waiting waiting doesn't solve anything and it's in my opinion it's as soon as you have an issue with anything it's much easier to to talk

42:23 about that possibly risking the the collaboration because if you wait it's just going to be harder and harder to talk about it and eventually you will just just like blow off when you were working with Tom and you guys were starting from scratch and you're going through that process of you know 11 products in a couple months one product a week what were you doing to decide sort of what to build how to validate it and also whether you would take funding for something if it did off how were you guys thinking about that as a co-founding team I think it was not just I'm not sure it was like crazy things we're just basically talking on talking on Zoom trying to brainstorm together

43:09 about what could be valuable the the one thing that I think what's interesting is if we got an ID we would try to ship during the same day and I mean by that if if the product like dur bring a zo a zoom call we could have something that we would find super valuable and I would end the zoom call and just start coding and try to get this ID app as soon as possible and it was I think I think it was super appreciated on both Sid that both of us were able to just like just ditch anything else and focus on the one idea that we got that's

43:57 we think is is valuable and did you guys know from day one that you were going to bootstrap not take funding that you wanted to also s exit at some point was that all planned yeah yeah this was planned like the the goal was work on an ID make it good to 10K in monthly Revenue set it for 1 million in less than a year and start over it it didn't really go like that because TW you grew way more than uh 10K monthly revenue and something i' expected to happen is that we we wouldn't find any buyer willing to buy this without having us on board for two

44:42 years and so this totally changed the plan of build sell start over saying are for two years that's a considerable ask I think for someone like you or me who's sort of a just loves to build things how did you find a deal structure that that worked for you just one thing before answering but I think it's not that it went wrong but I'm pretty I'm pretty confident that right now I would not said anything which required me to stay two years in business like I like I now consider my time to be way more valuable than it was before and two years is just huge so not anymore but your your

45:28 question is very legit like we we had a very early business like it was I think it was almost a year old when we were thinking about sending it like when when we had the first talk about sending it with the buyer and so it was super risky alen musk took over already on X uh we we knew that we were not really compliance with the LinkedIn rules so there was so many risk and so the the deal what that we found is that only 20% of the acquisition price would be paid up front and 80% of the acquisition price would be based on an

46:13 performance on performance Milestones Bas based on um monthly Revenue there were six Milestones that would unlock um that would allow us to get from the 2 million up fronts up to 10 million and we unlocked five of them and so we reach an 8 million of as a final acquisition price is that a structure you'd recommend other Founders like trying to find a creative solution like that mostly yes I think in our situation we couldn't have avoid that but I think that was pretty bad about this did is that those two years was very stressful

47:01 like it was really we we saw we got applied and we could have thought about okay so now even if we need to stay two years it's going to be transition time and we're going to train new people and they're going to they're going to like get into the product and they're going to manage it it was really not like that because of these because of those milestones and because of the performance uh thing we were like so pressurized like we're working even more than before you're still in yeah definitely so it's a it's a very tricky question we we would have probably we would have earned more without sending it but we got like so

47:47 many things happened we got suspended by by Twitter at one but we recovered from that and then there is a LinkedIn ban so it's very we are very happy this we SS platform risk again yep exactly for Founders who make it to the point where they know they want to sell how do they know they found the right buyer in your case it was like a childhood friend right he ended up buying yep it does really matter like the we got into codes where we would get we get acquired by very big uh us companies or a very big uh Indian company and it was it was very hard to have um like a a good and constructive uh talk we like obviously we're like just living

48:35 very different lives very different way of seeing things and so I have no idea how it would have gone but I'm pretty sure like we we got a very nice deal from a French company pretty much like it's a 60 people company so still very small very easy to talk with the founders and the executive team so I'm super happy with how it TNS any tips for other Founders who are negotiating deals yeah something which I think is very important is we all focus on the numbers but the like the terms there so so important the the terms is going to make it's going to make you bless your lawyer or uh want to kill him it's like

49:24 we we we skip them because we want the minions but just make sure that the ts are okay while bootstrap companies can get huge in general typically a venture scale billion dollar type outcome is is Out Of Reach unless you're raising money and you know going as fast as humanly possible you rais venture initially as we talked about and then you kind of went to the bootstrap route was that a function of like your goals changing or did you just want to get a win under your belt like what was the thought process there I think it was about how much I value my freedom covid had an impact here because of covid we were nomading with my wife I wasn't physically present in in Paris anymore

50:11 the thing is if he want to raise money you need to uh you need to talk with V's you need to hire a team and it's it's way harder to do that when you are when you are traveling and so I was kind of forced into this new life of bootstrapping and I really enjoyed it so it was a very happy accident since you've done both now would you recommend other Founders do one or the other first before trying the opposite if you run the math on how much you can get as a Founder raising money with a very successful startup it's not that much because very often you you gave away huge percentage

50:56 of of equity and so I would definitely recommend bootstrapping even even in this context of like AI blowing over and cost of building going almost to zero so I I do think that you need less money than you ever had I'm I'm getting I'm getting messages from people like I'm I'm getting a lot of people trying to like give me money to do things like they want to they want to invest into things that I do like into products into new startups but I don't dat it like I honestly don't need money to create SAS right now and so why would you raise and what like

51:41 taking money is always something that sounds appealing like you want to take it just in case but it add so many issues you have so many problems what do you think is the future of SAS right you mentioned right that you know SAS is getting easier to build you need less money for we talked earlier about how AI is impacting product not being a mode where do SAS Builders go from what's it going to look like five years down the road I think it really depends on where AI is going to go if it's true that AI can build a full saze in just a day with prompts I think that many companies will have a guy who will like really the

52:27 perfect s for them with AI and so they will almost not be paying for any software except those guy building and maintaining a huge number of of ss maybe it could go it could go that way another possibility is that this is overhyped and AI will not be able to do that in a long long time and so we're going to stay in pretty much the same situation as we are right now you have a lot of competition like you have it's it's way easier to build than it was before but we still value very well built software something that we were that that was not the case before I think is

53:13 right now I'm buying SAS because I know the founders and I won't I want to be closer from them like I want to be I want I want like I love the founders so much that I want to be I want to I want to give my money them instead of the competing product even if it's better yeah and I think this going to be more and more powerful talk about that a little bit more like in what way is that going to be more powerful one example is Dam Chen Dam Chen the founder of testimon do2 I love so much how like who he is like I love I love how he behaves on social media I love who he is as a person like the fact that he's a

54:00 father like me um how he's nice uh helpful and how he talks to people and so if if I'm paying for embed of a war of tweet like a testimonial tool I'm going to be paying for his tool because I really like I like who he is as a person so the value of a personal brand goes up exactly yeah exactly with what you mentioned about sort of having the perfect guy to build a tool for a specific company instead of buying all these external SAS products I think we're going to see the result of that or at least the viability of that pretty quickly you know Clara announced a few months ago that I think they're stopping a lot of their Enterprise contracts with like Salesforce and workday and other

54:45 big tools like that and they're building everything internally with AI so I think pretty quickly we're going to see if they're viable businesses to help companies do that or not based on whether they go back to B contracts or not especially like work day or like tools tools related to Legal thing it might be something that it's too soon I think but when you look at what Salesforce can do like when you look at all the custom things that you ask to Salesforce and like you need to hire developers working on Salesforce to customize for you it feels obvious to me that you can build something better very specific to your use case inally I think intuitively that makes sense to me too

55:31 if we are to believe that AI is as helpful and as good as as we're being told cool one more topic I want to hit on before we go into our little rapid fire outro that we do is burnout right so you did two Venture back companies you scaled them up to decently sized teams after that if I if I remember correctly you actually got a job at a scale up as CTO what was that like were you sort of burned out after the two Venture back companies is what was that uh time like for you I wouldn't say burnout because I was feeling okay it was just hard to go into like those two failures and I had to go to to court to close the company because it had debts and I was not able to pay for those

56:17 debts and my wife and I wanted to have a kid and so I was not I was not being able to like get money from my two first startups and so getting a job seemed like the reasonable and healthy thing to do and I was super happy about the job I I got it was super insightful and that's basically what got me into B2B SAS which is what I'm doing right now and so again happy acents yeah I mean you know knowing you as I do I can't imagine you work for somebody else other than yourself and that's a compliment and I also I know what it's like when a company that you sort of put everything into raise money for sort of you know

57:03 falls apart right it's tough takes a while to get over sometimes but I do think like to come back to your point like the the combination of Twitter X and other the social media like the fact of you see every day people succeeding they're like sharing their revenue milestones and at the same time you have an app and it's not taking off and you are shipping like crazy you are like very hardworking but it doesn't just work like that yeah I understand that like burnouts could be very close and you feel alone because you are just working remotely every day and I disagree with a lot of things that he says but Peter lez on X talks about how

57:51 Friends Community uh working outs is is an and eating healthy and sleeping he talks about that and I do think it helps like keeping a nice way of leaving yeah I do think it has sort of in this vein you mentioned something to me last time we chatted which was Founders never know when they need to quit but they definitely know when they need to continue and that kind of stuck me what do you mean yeah that's true that's so true like every time I reached pmf there were there were times where I was just so overwhelmed with customer Supports with the growth like fire fire to handle everywhere with the tech not

58:38 holding up and and during those times you just you just know that's you could you just get so many things to handle because of the growth that you just know that you have something valuable that's I think product market for sure that's actually similar what Mark andreon said in a blog post from like at this Point almost 20 years ago about product Market fit everything's falling down around you the customers are writing in constantly with support tickets you know you're on to something cool okay couple rapid fire ones here obviously TBO you're you're bootstrapping so many different products you're not taking money from investors anymore but who should Founders if anybody take money from who's an investor they should if I had to take money from someone it would be from like other Indie makers and other other

59:24 Founders I won't like I want to take money from guys who will Who did pretty much the same thing that I'm going to do and who would have like awesome awesome advice tips and who could be a little bit more handsome than any other investors out there what's one thing that you would change about the startup World copycats but again like um it's I think it's wrong to say that because I'm I'm taking like I'm I'm taking inspiration from existing software as well so it's it's a little bit Hypocrites to just critize copycats uh and and still be building Stu I think there's a there's a fine line right it's

1:00:10 like are you copying our landing page are you copying our onboarding are you copying the product versus getting inspired by an idea what's the number one piece of advice you would give to somebody who's just starting out first- time founder it's hard but just take the first ID that you have and ship it and and show it to the world and it's probably not going to work but you still need to do it because that's how you learn how that's how you get feedback and that's how you get a much better IDE and much better product to build and last one what's something you believe that most people disagree with you about that's that quantity is better than quality because

1:00:56 if you focus on quantity you would eventually uh deliver higher quality than if you focus on quality only you know there is this there is this study I think it's from Harvard that they gave an assignments and like they spit the group into one group they were just focusing on quality and the other group they were just focusing on quantity and and the B the best papers coming from this from both groups where from the go from the group delivering quantity what what I mean by that is you have a higher chance of delivering a very high quality products when you focus on quantity instead of just trying to be

1:01:43 the perfect thing from day one yeah you're more likely to find a global maximum versus a local maximum cool well TBO thanks for coming on man great to catch up in chat you have so much going on I don't even know what to plug uh where should people go to find you and use your products I think the the one place where uh I on board deerly is TM maker.io T like the later TM maker.io you have a link to my newsletter and my project there cool we'll we'll drop that into the description um thanks again for coming on man thank you Michael thanks for listening I write up my main takeaways from every conversation and make them available to all of our members at

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