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[00:00:00.400 --> 00:00:04.480] Hey, it's Arvid, and this is the Bootstrap Founder.
[00:00:08.960 --> 00:00:13.840] Today, I'm talking to Vova Feldman of the Merchant of Record payment provider Freemius.
[00:00:13.840 --> 00:00:22.240] I've met Vova a lot of times over the last several couple conferences I went to, and I thought it was time to bring him on the show and chat.
[00:00:22.240 --> 00:00:36.480] We talk about how hard it is to run a business that deals with payments in a very competitive space, how to build a team, how to build a good team, and how to find the right people for the right jobs and dealing with those early hires that just didn't work out.
[00:00:36.480 --> 00:00:50.000] We also talk about generating the energy to stay on course for many, many years, the choice between bootstrapping and raising capital, and how to be an involved founder still while giving space to your employees to do their best work.
[00:00:50.000 --> 00:00:50.960] Let's dive in.
[00:00:50.960 --> 00:00:54.160] Here's Vova.
[00:00:54.160 --> 00:00:56.400] Vova, hi, and welcome to the show.
[00:00:56.400 --> 00:00:59.040] You've been bootstrapping for 10 years now.
[00:00:59.040 --> 00:01:00.640] Now, that is mighty impressive.
[00:01:00.640 --> 00:01:02.720] Most people really don't make it anywhere.
[00:01:02.720 --> 00:01:07.760] They give up after the first couple months, if not a couple of weeks, even if they don't see results.
[00:01:07.760 --> 00:01:10.000] How did you stick around for this long?
[00:01:10.000 --> 00:01:12.000] Yeah, it's a really great question.
[00:01:12.320 --> 00:01:18.880] I think the first main reason for that is that I'm really excited about the problem that I'm solving.
[00:01:18.880 --> 00:01:21.600] It's something that I personally faced.
[00:01:21.600 --> 00:01:27.040] I built this micro SAS and a pass and try to monetize that, joined with another guy.
[00:01:27.040 --> 00:01:29.280] We spent like a year working on it.
[00:01:29.280 --> 00:01:39.600] And in the end, we kind of discovered that basically the whole like monetization part of things is way more complex and time-consuming than actually building the product.
[00:01:39.600 --> 00:01:45.520] So that got me to this like realization that there is a bigger problem and something that I solved.
[00:01:45.520 --> 00:01:53.440] So I was very passionate to basically take something that I faced and try to bring it to the world.
[00:01:53.440 --> 00:01:59.720] Another thing is focusing on the target audience that I personally relate with.
[00:01:59.720 --> 00:02:02.360] It's like people like me, right?
[00:01:59.280 --> 00:02:05.800] So I know the language, I know the people.
[00:02:06.280 --> 00:02:14.440] I like to hang with those people to, you know, have a beer and a conference together, chat about business challenges.
[00:02:14.440 --> 00:02:19.480] So the problem and the audience are very close to my heart.
[00:02:19.480 --> 00:02:23.640] Another thing is having a very big vision.
[00:02:23.640 --> 00:02:31.480] I think that at least for me, and I think many people who are, you know, founders, they're basically high achievers.
[00:02:31.480 --> 00:02:33.320] They want to do great things.
[00:02:33.640 --> 00:02:40.680] And what really pushes them is constantly growing, learning new things, and building something bigger.
[00:02:40.680 --> 00:02:49.160] And if your vision, mission is like quite small, you get to a certain point that you feel, okay, what's next?
[00:02:49.160 --> 00:03:00.200] I don't know like whether you're growing or not, but in terms of like the product development, you feel that you kind of maxed out and you have that each, okay, I want to move to the next thing.
[00:03:00.200 --> 00:03:14.360] So what happened to me personally, I'm coming from like a traditional startup background, went through like the VC route and startup accelerators, being in TechSource Boston, another accelerator in Silicon Valley.
[00:03:14.360 --> 00:03:17.880] So when I started with Frame Use, that was my natural route.
[00:03:17.880 --> 00:03:18.840] This is what I knew.
[00:03:18.840 --> 00:03:26.200] I opened a US incorporation, no LC, straight to, you know, had a stock option for future employees.
[00:03:26.200 --> 00:03:29.480] It was all based on the template that I learned.
[00:03:29.480 --> 00:03:33.080] And I went to this hunt of, you know, raising money.
[00:03:33.080 --> 00:03:36.600] I went to the Silicon Valley, to Boston area.
[00:03:36.600 --> 00:03:42.360] And in order to pitch to VCs, you have to have a grand vision, right?
[00:03:42.360 --> 00:03:44.360] To show that mega market.
[00:03:44.360 --> 00:03:51.040] And you can't just pitch what most of us are doing, kind of starting very small, validating.
[00:03:44.760 --> 00:03:52.080] It's just not enough.
[00:03:52.400 --> 00:03:56.400] So you have to force yourself thinking about a much bigger problem.
[00:03:56.400 --> 00:03:58.000] Like, okay, this is what I'm tackling.
[00:03:58.000 --> 00:03:59.680] The story needs to make sense, right?
[00:03:59.680 --> 00:04:04.720] You have to show this billion-dollar opportunity in order to be fundable.
[00:04:05.040 --> 00:04:12.080] So it pushes you to think further down the line in a way that maybe you'll never get there, right?
[00:04:12.080 --> 00:04:16.560] But there is always some like further path to go to.
[00:04:16.560 --> 00:04:22.800] So I think like we've been focused on specific ecosystem, which is WordPress for so many years.
[00:04:23.120 --> 00:04:32.960] But because of going through that initial phase of creating the, you know, the pitch deck to investors, I always had that, okay, what would be the next kind of ecosystem?
[00:04:32.960 --> 00:04:38.480] And we only now, after like nine years, we got to that next phase, right?
[00:04:38.480 --> 00:04:51.040] So it took a very long period, but it's not boring because now we're kind of, it's not really starting from scratch, but the excitement is like, I'm seeing the team, I see myself.
[00:04:51.040 --> 00:04:54.960] It's like gave us so much energy to get into this whole new ecosystem.
[00:04:54.960 --> 00:04:59.200] So I think having that long-term kind of vision, it's important.
[00:04:59.200 --> 00:05:04.000] It does add an overhead in the beginning because you need to think through this stuff.
[00:05:04.000 --> 00:05:07.040] But I feel that it's definitely worth it.
[00:05:07.360 --> 00:05:13.280] Another thing that I can think of is that I managed to grow a team.
[00:05:13.280 --> 00:05:18.480] So when you're just alone, it's like really hard to grind for 10 years.
[00:05:18.520 --> 00:05:31.320] You know, like I remember it took me probably seven years until I was able to delegate, like to take off my engineering hat, to pass it over to other team members.
[00:05:29.920 --> 00:05:34.200] And the support probably took me like five years.
[00:05:34.360 --> 00:05:41.640] So it means every time my wife and I were going to vacation, I'm doing health scout tickets in the morning, in the evening.
[00:05:41.960 --> 00:05:44.360] You can't do it for 10 years, you know?
[00:05:44.680 --> 00:05:45.640] I know, man.
[00:05:45.640 --> 00:05:48.680] Unless you have an extremely patient partner.
[00:05:48.680 --> 00:05:51.800] And maybe also somebody who really gets what you're doing.
[00:05:51.800 --> 00:05:53.080] Like, I'm fortunate with that.
[00:05:53.080 --> 00:05:55.880] Like, my partner, we had a business together, like a software business.
[00:05:55.880 --> 00:05:59.320] She gets totally what this is about and why it works.
[00:05:59.320 --> 00:06:05.880] And still, I want to get into the delegating part much quicker than five years with this thing that I'm building right now.
[00:06:05.880 --> 00:06:09.400] Because I know, like, it is stressful and it is anxiety inducing.
[00:06:09.400 --> 00:06:12.040] And everything I hear you say makes perfect sense to me.
[00:06:12.040 --> 00:06:22.040] Like, have this vision, have interest in the people that you're serving, have an understanding of the actual need, and also be able to give part of the work to other people.
[00:06:22.040 --> 00:06:30.200] Yet, when you put them all together and you're only one person, like all of this is super overwhelming because you have to deal with everything at the same time.
[00:06:30.200 --> 00:06:32.200] Did you put these things in a certain order?
[00:06:32.200 --> 00:06:35.560] Like, did you have a priority when it came to vision first?
[00:06:35.560 --> 00:06:37.240] And then I think about the other thing.
[00:06:37.240 --> 00:06:39.000] Like, how did you struggle with that?
[00:06:39.000 --> 00:06:41.000] Or how did you organize this in the beginning?
[00:06:41.000 --> 00:06:43.640] Yeah, so the big vision, I was forced, right?
[00:06:43.640 --> 00:06:45.000] Because that's the way that I knew.
[00:06:45.000 --> 00:06:47.800] I went to fundraise before I started to code anything.
[00:06:47.800 --> 00:06:49.080] That was my first thing.
[00:06:49.080 --> 00:06:51.480] So I worked on slides in the beginning.
[00:06:51.720 --> 00:06:53.160] So that's how it started.
[00:06:53.160 --> 00:06:59.080] In terms of the team, I did manage to raise some money, but very small from Angel Investors.
[00:06:59.080 --> 00:07:03.480] And it did help me to get that initial first two years going.
[00:07:03.480 --> 00:07:09.480] But in terms of hiring, as a bootstrap business, you're pretty much limited based on your income.
[00:07:09.800 --> 00:07:16.720] So it was very gradual until we hit a certain point when we had really fast, like rapid growth.
[00:07:17.040 --> 00:07:24.080] And then the challenge was to actually find time to do hiring because that's extremely time consuming.
[00:07:24.080 --> 00:07:30.080] Like in the beginning, when you're, let's say, one, two, three people, it's okay, everything is moving very fast.
[00:07:30.080 --> 00:07:38.800] But once you want to grow a little faster, like you need to train people, but you also have all the other hats that you're wearing, especially if you're growing.
[00:07:39.200 --> 00:07:42.720] It's this like constant battle of, oh, I'm growing the business.
[00:07:42.720 --> 00:07:53.120] I have more money to spend, but now I have more support load from customers because most businesses, it's kind of linear, the support and your growth.
[00:07:53.120 --> 00:08:00.000] And it's hard to keep up with all those, like you said, there are like so many things that you need to do in parallel.
[00:08:00.000 --> 00:08:01.840] It's very challenging.
[00:08:01.840 --> 00:08:09.360] And I can tell you, because of the lack of time and the focus of being the CTO and the CEO and all these, I hired the wrong people.
[00:08:09.360 --> 00:08:10.640] And also lack of budget.
[00:08:10.640 --> 00:08:16.000] In the beginning, if you don't have good budget to hire, so you have to compromise.
[00:08:16.000 --> 00:08:20.160] You have to get junior people in the beginning and you need to train them.
[00:08:20.160 --> 00:08:23.840] So you also need to become an expert in everything, which is kind of insane, right?
[00:08:23.840 --> 00:08:30.800] Because I learned how to be a marketer and SEO and a developer, a product person, a recruiter.
[00:08:30.800 --> 00:08:32.720] And I mean, it's awesome.
[00:08:32.720 --> 00:08:36.640] It's awesome that you acquire all those skills, but it's also crazy.
[00:08:36.640 --> 00:08:44.880] And I want to say that with age, maybe, you know, if you're 20 years old, you have 40, 16 hours per day.
[00:08:45.200 --> 00:08:58.080] But when you get to the 40s, which is a lot of our, you know, of the people that I met in Microcon, my age, right, you already have kids and you can't work so much, period.
[00:08:58.080 --> 00:09:00.000] It's just unrealistic.
[00:09:00.280 --> 00:09:09.560] So the fact that I could take three weeks off completely and be with my wife and my baby, he was born, is because I had a team.
[00:09:09.880 --> 00:09:13.880] And that event actually put me, like forced me.
[00:09:13.880 --> 00:09:15.400] to build a strong team.
[00:09:15.400 --> 00:09:18.760] Like I knew that I need to be able to do that, right?
[00:09:18.760 --> 00:09:23.880] So for about a year since we got pregnant, you know, it was that was my focus.
[00:09:23.880 --> 00:09:32.600] I need to bring people so I can, you know, if I out for three weeks, the business is running, plus everyone knows what they need to do.
[00:09:32.600 --> 00:09:40.920] So it's not that, of course, when I'm there, it's like I'm able to push everyone, you know, to the right direction, moving faster and everything.
[00:09:40.920 --> 00:09:59.240] But that was kind of the time when I started to think more about, okay, annual planning and everyone needs to know exactly what they need to do and being less like opportunistic and kind of improvising on the fly, but actually being more methodological in terms of, okay, roadmap, we have to stick with it.
[00:09:59.240 --> 00:10:00.840] This is what everyone doing.
[00:10:00.840 --> 00:10:06.600] So all those life changes, they're forcing you to do some things.
[00:10:06.600 --> 00:10:10.680] But it's awesome because also for me, you know, like I love coding.
[00:10:10.680 --> 00:10:13.480] I don't do it anymore, unfortunately.
[00:10:13.480 --> 00:10:15.080] I really miss that.
[00:10:15.080 --> 00:10:17.720] But I acquired so many new skills right now.
[00:10:18.040 --> 00:10:27.320] So today I'm focused on recruitment, on talking, doing podcasting, all those things that like you may find it surprising.
[00:10:27.320 --> 00:10:30.760] I'm introvert, like many people in our ecosystem.
[00:10:30.760 --> 00:10:35.720] But once you go to 100 conferences, you learn how to talk with people.
[00:10:35.720 --> 00:10:41.800] Yeah, I could tell when I met you in MicroConf this time around this year that you're comfortable there, right?
[00:10:41.800 --> 00:10:51.920] Like you enjoy the company of your fellow founders and hanging out with them and talking shop with them and inviting them to do stuff and having chats with them, like this one too.
[00:10:51.920 --> 00:10:52.560] That is cool.
[00:10:52.560 --> 00:10:58.000] And I love in all of this that this is something you don't delegate, that that's something you actually still do yourself, right?
[00:10:58.000 --> 00:11:06.720] Like going to a conference and showing up with swag and handing it out to people and talking about the business and asking questions, like making partnerships happen.
[00:11:06.720 --> 00:11:12.480] That is something that to me often sounds like, oh, yeah, that's what business development people do, right?
[00:11:12.480 --> 00:11:14.720] That's what this particular part of the business is.
[00:11:14.880 --> 00:11:17.600] Well, I'm still wearing that hat, you know, the business development.
[00:11:18.000 --> 00:11:18.800] Exactly.
[00:11:18.800 --> 00:11:20.080] That's exactly what it is.
[00:11:20.080 --> 00:11:27.520] Like, that's the hat you haven't given up because, in your case, like, you are a person that really gets your peers and you sell to peers, right?
[00:11:27.520 --> 00:11:29.920] You sell to entrepreneurs, you sell to founders.
[00:11:29.920 --> 00:11:34.240] So it would be a waste of your connection with them to not do this yourself.
[00:11:34.240 --> 00:11:41.760] Man, I love this kind of dichotomy of delegating because, on the one hand, you build a business like a founder, like became pregnant, need to change stuff.
[00:11:41.760 --> 00:11:42.640] What's my runway?
[00:11:42.640 --> 00:11:43.200] Nine months.
[00:11:43.200 --> 00:11:44.480] Okay, gotta fix this, right?
[00:11:44.480 --> 00:11:48.960] This is such a founder mode of changing your own business as well.
[00:11:48.960 --> 00:11:59.920] And then on the other hand, you do things still that other people probably would have delegated because you know the benefits of doing this as a founder-led activity outweighs the benefit of hiring somebody for it.
[00:11:59.920 --> 00:12:01.120] So it's kind of a balance here.
[00:12:01.120 --> 00:12:02.480] I find it very interesting.
[00:12:02.480 --> 00:12:04.640] That's a very bootstrapper mentality thing.
[00:12:04.640 --> 00:12:07.760] And I'm glad that even 10 years into this, you haven't given that up.
[00:12:07.760 --> 00:12:12.080] I think that's very inspirational to see that you can retain this as a founder.
[00:12:12.080 --> 00:12:14.640] You can retain this approach to, let's see, right?
[00:12:14.640 --> 00:12:16.320] Okay, I have this amount of time.
[00:12:16.320 --> 00:12:17.920] I have these kind of skills.
[00:12:17.920 --> 00:12:19.360] Let's put them to use.
[00:12:19.360 --> 00:12:34.440] And since you were wearing all these hats and you're saying you still wear some and you're trying to give away the others, coding, for example, I mean, show me a really good software developer that actually is still coding and not just like maintaining an AI trying to code for them at this point, right?
[00:12:34.440 --> 00:12:48.280] I think most devs that are trying to produce code for a living to build a business have embraced AI just as a junior working for them or a senior that is occasionally going into the absolute wrong direction.
[00:12:48.280 --> 00:12:50.440] But let's maybe leave that part aside.
[00:12:50.440 --> 00:12:53.560] So most people who code don't really code that much anymore.
[00:12:53.560 --> 00:12:59.880] A lot of that is just, you know, being a technical leader in the team, and the team members are all virtual.
[00:12:59.880 --> 00:13:07.160] How much do you use AI in your many different hat-wearing capacities at this point?
[00:13:07.160 --> 00:13:08.040] A lot.
[00:13:08.040 --> 00:13:09.800] A lot, honestly.
[00:13:09.800 --> 00:13:12.600] I mean, not in coding because I don't do that anymore.
[00:13:12.600 --> 00:13:18.440] And I think the part that I'm most passionate about in coding, it's not the coding itself, it's the creation, right?
[00:13:18.440 --> 00:13:21.800] Because it's like 100% productivity.
[00:13:21.800 --> 00:13:26.040] There's no other job in the world that is so productive, like coding.
[00:13:26.040 --> 00:13:29.160] So I think that that part I'm really kind of missing.
[00:13:29.160 --> 00:13:46.120] But in terms of using AI, I'm man, I'm talking with ChatGPT the entire day, like honestly, because a lot of my work is writing and creating processes, direction, and it's a lot of communications.
[00:13:46.120 --> 00:13:49.560] And this is what AI is really good at.
[00:13:49.560 --> 00:13:51.320] And it saves me tons of time.
[00:13:51.320 --> 00:14:00.040] So I can give an example that earlier this year, we went through a proper OKRs process.
[00:14:00.040 --> 00:14:06.280] Kind of with Grind, we wanted to, okay, we are getting into like new market, let's do it the right way.
[00:14:06.600 --> 00:14:12.280] And in the beginning, I had a guy that was supposed to become my COO.
[00:14:12.280 --> 00:14:16.560] He left the company, but in the beginning, he kind of supported that process.
[00:14:16.560 --> 00:14:17.600] And then he left.
[00:14:17.840 --> 00:14:21.760] He did train me a little bit, but I was still missing information.
[00:14:21.760 --> 00:14:27.680] And that's where AI really helped me kind of fill all the missing gaps in the process.
[00:14:27.680 --> 00:14:36.960] So it helped me guiding us through a strategic process of how to do it, the terminology, why we do some things, why is this the practice, etc.
[00:14:37.040 --> 00:14:42.400] Instead of going, and I did a little course as well, but this is like more practical.
[00:14:42.400 --> 00:14:44.960] You know, it gives you what needs to be done.
[00:14:44.960 --> 00:14:48.240] And it is just, yeah, I use AI a lot.
[00:14:48.240 --> 00:14:53.840] Do you see replacing humans in a particular job, like a COO?
[00:14:53.840 --> 00:14:56.400] Do you think this can be completely agentic at some point?
[00:14:56.400 --> 00:15:00.080] Like in the near future, I know that 20 years from now, you know, who knows?
[00:15:00.080 --> 00:15:09.200] I mean, we probably don't even know what's going to happen next year, but within the next couple of months and years, do you see actual AI systems replacing people like in a business like yours?
[00:15:09.200 --> 00:15:10.720] Or do you still want people there?
[00:15:10.720 --> 00:15:12.480] I definitely want people there.
[00:15:12.480 --> 00:15:14.000] I want senior people.
[00:15:14.000 --> 00:15:19.280] This is also something that I realized that there is a like I'm looking for A players.
[00:15:19.280 --> 00:15:20.720] You know, I try different things.
[00:15:20.720 --> 00:15:27.680] If you can, if you have the budget for A players and you're able to get them, it's a game changer completely.
[00:15:27.680 --> 00:15:34.560] Bringing peers that can, you know, think with you together and you're not just telling them what to do.
[00:15:34.560 --> 00:15:39.200] And they're way better than what you're doing, whatever role that you're hiring them for.
[00:15:39.200 --> 00:15:42.080] This is a game changer, and this is what I'm aiming for.
[00:15:42.080 --> 00:15:46.160] I think that AI does remove some jobs.
[00:15:46.560 --> 00:15:50.880] Some jobs will disappear and move to AI, especially with agents.
[00:15:51.200 --> 00:15:59.760] I definitely think that you still need the human side of things, but some roles will disappear, you know?
[00:15:59.760 --> 00:16:00.600] Yeah, for sure.
[00:16:00.920 --> 00:16:02.360] Things in the balance, right?
[00:16:02.360 --> 00:16:22.200] You don't really know where the software development is going, like as an actual job, if it's going to be more of I'm monitoring a fleet of virtual developers and whichever result is the best is going to be what makes it into the code base, or if you actually still have people handcrafting code and that is something that is completely AI-less and people pay for that.
[00:16:22.200 --> 00:16:24.040] Who knows where this is going to go?
[00:16:24.040 --> 00:16:27.640] I appreciate that you speak about humans.
[00:16:27.640 --> 00:16:31.640] Like when you say a players, I see like somebody who really cares, right?
[00:16:31.640 --> 00:16:38.600] It's somebody who has this internal deep motivation to do a great job because they know that they have an impact on other people.
[00:16:38.600 --> 00:16:46.520] And I feel that's something that AI does not have in the sense that it is soulless in the best sense of the word, right?
[00:16:46.520 --> 00:16:53.960] It doesn't have like a deep internal drive other than to take over the world, maybe.
[00:16:53.960 --> 00:16:57.000] But you know, like LLMs try to convince you that they're right.
[00:16:57.000 --> 00:17:00.840] That is not the same as somebody who's motivated to make an impact on the world.
[00:17:00.840 --> 00:17:03.480] So where did you find the people that you hired for Freemius?
[00:17:03.480 --> 00:17:06.520] Because that's one of the things about hiring that freaks me out.
[00:17:06.520 --> 00:17:07.560] I don't know where to look.
[00:17:07.560 --> 00:17:15.560] So we're completely like remote all over the world, as long as you can work European working hours, because that's something that we found.
[00:17:15.560 --> 00:17:17.160] We have to work at the same time.
[00:17:17.160 --> 00:17:20.200] Otherwise, at least for us, it is not working.
[00:17:20.200 --> 00:17:27.880] Like, this is how I build Freemius, and we want to be in sync and run as efficiently as possible.
[00:17:27.880 --> 00:17:32.360] And I got people through different channels.
[00:17:32.360 --> 00:17:54.080] And I think the best and the easiest hires are from referrals from other team members that, you know, worked with a person in a previous job, and it saves the time to hire them because they can just, you know, they already qualified and just by, you know, kind of a trust, you know, someone you trust, a trust third person.
[00:17:54.400 --> 00:17:58.560] But I also found amazing people through other channels.
[00:17:58.560 --> 00:18:04.000] You know, some of them were using Freemuse, so people in the ecosystem.
[00:18:04.000 --> 00:18:07.920] I am looking for people, at least in our size, we're at 20 right now.
[00:18:08.240 --> 00:18:22.800] We're still small, and I do care to bring people that care about our mission, that are really motivated beyond doing an exceptional job for themselves, but also get excited about the problem we're solving, the people we're serving.
[00:18:22.800 --> 00:18:27.120] So they'll have that passion beyond just, you know, executing their job.
[00:18:27.120 --> 00:18:28.960] So this is a critical part for me.
[00:18:28.960 --> 00:18:34.320] And I'm always looking like the hiring process evolved over the years, obviously.
[00:18:34.320 --> 00:18:36.880] But I got some people through my personal network.
[00:18:36.880 --> 00:18:44.240] Like when I was looking for a CTO, I was literally dating with someone on a weekly basis.
[00:18:44.240 --> 00:18:49.840] So it's about sending your, you know, your arms to all your connections.
[00:18:49.840 --> 00:18:59.040] For me, it was the other founders that I know and kind of spreading the word, going to a beer with them, kind of getting them excited about what we're doing.
[00:18:59.040 --> 00:19:05.920] So whenever they meet or know about someone who is technical in that case, they just met me and they're excited about what they're doing.
[00:19:05.920 --> 00:19:08.480] They say, hey, I know this guy, a friend of mine, right?
[00:19:08.480 --> 00:19:10.320] He's working on something exciting.
[00:19:10.320 --> 00:19:11.440] Maybe you should meet.
[00:19:11.440 --> 00:19:13.280] But you have to stay on top of mind.
[00:19:13.280 --> 00:19:18.800] So it took me two years to find a CTO of like a lot of beer drinking, honestly.
[00:19:19.760 --> 00:19:23.040] Well, that's that's suffering that I'm willingly going to do.
[00:19:24.000 --> 00:19:26.000] But yeah, I mean, that is impressive.
[00:19:26.000 --> 00:19:28.080] Like two years of just keeping at it.
[00:19:28.080 --> 00:19:32.920] Again, this is something that most people probably would stop a couple months in, right?
[00:19:32.920 --> 00:19:39.160] That's something that for most people feel, I'm gonna do something else, or I'm gonna get a recruiter to hire one for me.
[00:19:39.160 --> 00:19:40.040] But you stuck with it.
[00:19:40.040 --> 00:19:48.680] That is, I just want to point this out because that is something that I struggle with, like to stay on top of things and just keep doing them even though they don't work.
[00:19:48.680 --> 00:19:51.880] I mean, with Potskin, it took me a year to become profitable.
[00:19:51.880 --> 00:19:55.800] That is enough, like a year of not being profitable and trying to be profitable.
[00:19:55.800 --> 00:19:57.080] That is a lot of work.
[00:19:57.080 --> 00:20:03.320] But doing this for two, doing this for four or five, phew, that would be a lot of stress and anxiety.
[00:20:03.320 --> 00:20:06.680] So, how did you find this motivation like every single day when you did it?
[00:20:06.680 --> 00:20:08.760] Like, what is the driving force?
[00:20:08.920 --> 00:20:18.600] I know you have a mission, and it would be nice if you could actually state that, if you could say, like, exactly what the mission of Freemuse is, because I think that would be very interesting to hear like the nuanced take you have.
[00:20:18.600 --> 00:20:23.400] Is the mission enough to stay that focused for that long?
[00:20:23.400 --> 00:20:28.760] It's a combination of the mission and the drive to grow.
[00:20:28.760 --> 00:20:34.680] So, the mission is helping fellow makers to make a living out of their passion.
[00:20:34.680 --> 00:20:39.160] This is our mission, which turns what we're doing as a passion as well, right?
[00:20:39.160 --> 00:20:40.840] So, it's kind of meta.
[00:20:40.840 --> 00:20:42.680] And it came for a reason, right?
[00:20:42.680 --> 00:20:46.200] So, it took me many years until I realized that I have to do it.
[00:20:46.200 --> 00:20:51.480] So, we've been stuck in this nine to 12 team members for about three years.
[00:20:51.480 --> 00:21:00.680] And it was this limbo that, you know, we hire someone, hire another, fire, and we constantly, a little more, a little less, a little more, a little less.
[00:21:00.680 --> 00:21:04.680] And I realized that I can't keep, like, I have to bring senior people.
[00:21:04.680 --> 00:21:12.040] I can't keep growing it myself because you can't hire great people when you don't have the time to invest in that.
[00:21:12.200 --> 00:21:13.560] Simple as that.
[00:21:13.560 --> 00:21:24.320] So, I realized that if I want to grow beyond that 12 team members, and I felt that we had to because we're growing a lot customer-wise, so we have to keep supporting them.
[00:21:24.320 --> 00:21:27.760] Like, I have to invest in building a leadership team.
[00:21:27.760 --> 00:21:29.200] So, this is what I've done.
[00:21:29.200 --> 00:21:34.560] You know, I had that mission to build that kind of leadership team in that phase.
[00:21:34.560 --> 00:21:38.800] And this is what I started to do basically, as long as it takes.
[00:21:38.800 --> 00:21:46.160] Because, however I looked at it, if I wanted to be on the next phase, like after that, I had to go through that stage.
[00:21:46.160 --> 00:21:48.320] So, there was no way out of it.
[00:21:48.320 --> 00:21:49.360] I just had to do it.
[00:21:49.360 --> 00:21:50.560] This is how I looked at it.
[00:21:50.560 --> 00:21:51.200] That makes sense.
[00:21:51.200 --> 00:21:55.280] Like, if you have a forcing function like this, that keeps you motivated.
[00:21:55.280 --> 00:21:58.800] I mean, I didn't want to sell, you know, so that was not an option for me.
[00:21:58.800 --> 00:22:02.880] And there's no point to close because it's working and it's growing.
[00:22:02.880 --> 00:22:08.080] So, I either grow with that or I drown with everything that's happening.
[00:22:08.080 --> 00:22:15.520] It literally drowning because there's like too much operations and all the things that are happening that we have to scale the team.
[00:22:15.520 --> 00:22:16.480] Why not sell?
[00:22:16.480 --> 00:22:18.160] Because I'm passionate about that.
[00:22:18.160 --> 00:22:19.680] You know, I'm enjoying that.
[00:22:19.680 --> 00:22:21.680] Let's say I'm selling it, right?
[00:22:21.680 --> 00:22:22.960] What's the outcome?
[00:22:22.960 --> 00:22:25.360] I mean, there's financial thingy.
[00:22:25.360 --> 00:22:28.480] I will just add that I already exited a company before.
[00:22:28.480 --> 00:22:31.360] So, I do have that cushion, right?
[00:22:31.360 --> 00:22:35.040] So, I don't feel that in stress from a financial perspective.
[00:22:35.040 --> 00:22:36.480] And this is definitely important.
[00:22:36.480 --> 00:22:43.120] So, I would say that before you make that first life-changing exit, if you have an opportunity to sell, right?
[00:22:43.120 --> 00:22:44.960] You should definitely consider that.
[00:22:44.960 --> 00:22:46.720] But I didn't have that pressure.
[00:22:46.720 --> 00:22:49.280] I was doing something that I'm really excited about.
[00:22:49.280 --> 00:22:51.000] It's growing very fast.
[00:22:51.000 --> 00:22:51.240] Right.
[00:22:51.280 --> 00:22:56.160] So, what's the point to just give it to someone else and then start again from the beginning?
[00:22:56.160 --> 00:22:56.520] Yeah.
[00:22:56.840 --> 00:22:57.240] Right.
[00:22:57.280 --> 00:22:58.480] That's the founder problem.
[00:22:58.640 --> 00:22:59.760] You got to do something.
[00:22:59.760 --> 00:23:00.280] Yeah.
[00:23:00.280 --> 00:23:02.440] And probably something that you're passionate about.
[00:22:59.840 --> 00:23:04.520] So you might build the same thing again.
[00:23:04.760 --> 00:23:13.000] I hear so many stories of founders who just wait out the period that they're not allowed to build the product again and then build it again.
[00:23:13.560 --> 00:23:19.160] So funny, like the non-compete expires and they're right at it again, which is kind of you're right.
[00:23:19.240 --> 00:23:22.440] Pointless if the passion is in the product itself.
[00:23:22.440 --> 00:23:23.000] Yeah.
[00:23:23.000 --> 00:23:26.280] And I had so much more to build and to do.
[00:23:26.280 --> 00:23:28.520] And like, you know, the vision was there.
[00:23:28.520 --> 00:23:31.720] It's big and it's still like gigantic for me.
[00:23:31.720 --> 00:23:38.120] Did this vision ever change like along just the development of the industry that you were serving over time?
[00:23:38.120 --> 00:23:45.160] Because 10 years ago, building a merchant of record, building a payment platform probably looked slightly different than it does today.
[00:23:45.160 --> 00:23:47.240] Well, maybe I didn't use the terminology.
[00:23:47.240 --> 00:23:48.760] It wasn't as common.
[00:23:48.760 --> 00:23:53.240] But the whole merchant of record, it was unplanned thingy.
[00:23:53.240 --> 00:23:53.720] Okay.
[00:23:53.720 --> 00:24:01.000] It was for me, I need to solve a problem of taking a product and moving it to a selling solution, right?
[00:24:01.000 --> 00:24:02.920] Something that you can sell globally.
[00:24:02.920 --> 00:24:05.160] That was the problem I'm trying to solve.
[00:24:05.160 --> 00:24:15.080] And then I looked on an ecosystem and I see that Stripe and PayPal, they are only available in a limited amount of countries, but the world is much bigger.
[00:24:15.080 --> 00:24:21.480] And I do want those people all over the world to use Freemas to solve their pain and solve their problem.
[00:24:21.480 --> 00:24:22.840] So how do I do that?
[00:24:22.840 --> 00:24:27.480] Okay, we need to tackle it, we need to take the payments and use our payment gateways.
[00:24:27.480 --> 00:24:28.760] So that was the reason.
[00:24:28.760 --> 00:24:31.880] It wasn't about I want to solve sales taxes.
[00:24:31.880 --> 00:24:33.720] No, it's a pain in the ass.
[00:24:33.720 --> 00:24:35.480] I don't want to deal with that, right?
[00:24:36.120 --> 00:24:48.640] But indirectly, you get into those problems, you solve them as your personal pain, but it's amazing that it, you know, relieves all the other that are using Freemis that they don't need to deal with that.
[00:24:44.840 --> 00:24:51.680] But it wasn't about, oh, let's do a merchant of record.
[00:24:52.320 --> 00:24:55.120] Has it become easier to do payments globally?
[00:24:55.120 --> 00:25:01.600] Because in my, let's call it naive mind, the internet economy just gets better and better at building technical solutions.
[00:25:01.600 --> 00:25:15.200] But then I remember when we ran Feedback Panda, the business that I sold and exited a couple of years ago, at some point, India had a banking regulation overhaul that made it almost impossible to get like recurring subscriptions going.
[00:25:15.200 --> 00:25:18.000] So things got harder instead of easier.
[00:25:18.000 --> 00:25:22.880] Like, how does that work for you as somebody who has to take money from like hundreds of countries at this point?
[00:25:22.880 --> 00:25:24.640] There is always something.
[00:25:24.640 --> 00:25:25.360] Always.
[00:25:25.520 --> 00:25:26.000] Yeah.
[00:25:26.640 --> 00:25:27.920] It's never ending.
[00:25:27.920 --> 00:25:30.800] There are regulations coming all the time.
[00:25:30.800 --> 00:25:33.520] Now the next one, the European Union love regulations.
[00:25:33.760 --> 00:25:34.160] They love that.
[00:25:34.480 --> 00:25:36.800] They're constantly coming with you things.
[00:25:36.800 --> 00:25:49.360] GDPR, EU VAT, you know, like they are the ones that kind of pioneered the whole concept of, you know, let's charge people, even if they're late-charge companies, you know, VAT, even though they're not local.
[00:25:49.360 --> 00:25:52.800] And everyone said, oh, you know, they can I curse in this show.
[00:25:52.800 --> 00:25:53.440] I don't know.
[00:25:53.760 --> 00:25:54.400] Yeah, sure.
[00:25:54.720 --> 00:25:57.360] When it comes to VAT, please do.
[00:25:57.360 --> 00:25:57.840] Yeah.
[00:25:57.840 --> 00:25:58.480] Yeah, yeah.
[00:25:58.480 --> 00:26:01.920] So everyone said, oh, fuck, there's an opportunity to make more money.
[00:26:01.920 --> 00:26:04.960] So all the countries started to kind of follow that pattern.
[00:26:04.960 --> 00:26:07.600] But there's the Accessibility Act coming.
[00:26:07.600 --> 00:26:15.280] I mean, the origins of what they're doing make sense and some of the things, but it just keeps adding complexities all the time.
[00:26:15.280 --> 00:26:27.120] And when you have to sell globally and comply with all those regulations, I think that one of the biggest underestimated things are maintenance.
[00:26:27.120 --> 00:26:34.040] Okay, you start, you know, collecting, remitting, dealing with taxes or some regulation in one place, but it's not done.
[00:26:34.360 --> 00:26:38.360] You have to constantly keep watching, monitoring what's happening.
[00:26:38.600 --> 00:26:42.120] like taxability classification changing.
[00:26:42.120 --> 00:26:49.080] One place is charging SaaS today, tomorrow they change the rule or the tax rate is going down or whatever.
[00:26:49.080 --> 00:26:54.360] So you have to like monitor all these signals and yeah, it's never ending.
[00:26:54.360 --> 00:26:58.120] For a company of 20, that sounds like a lot of work.
[00:26:58.120 --> 00:27:04.760] Like I would assume that, you know, if you mentioned Stripe and similar big players in the field, they have thousands of employees.
[00:27:04.760 --> 00:27:08.520] Half of them probably are just lawyers trying to figure all of this out, right?
[00:27:08.520 --> 00:27:10.600] So even they struggle with that.
[00:27:10.600 --> 00:27:18.760] Like for a much smaller business that is more focused in terms of who they serve and therefore can handle this, it still must be a lot of work, right?
[00:27:18.760 --> 00:27:20.040] For a team of 20.
[00:27:20.280 --> 00:27:24.440] Does that ever make you want to build out a much bigger company?
[00:27:24.440 --> 00:27:25.800] How do you approach this?
[00:27:25.800 --> 00:27:31.640] Yeah, I want to stay as small as possible as a team, but we do need to grow and we are hiring, right?
[00:27:31.640 --> 00:27:34.760] But I don't want to go crazy, not right now.
[00:27:34.760 --> 00:27:37.000] I don't think it's needed in our case.
[00:27:37.000 --> 00:27:42.360] Maybe in the future, just in a way that, you know, the bigger the organization, things are just slower.
[00:27:42.360 --> 00:27:43.800] That's the way it works.
[00:27:43.800 --> 00:27:47.400] You have more smarter people and you want to hear their advice.
[00:27:47.400 --> 00:27:49.960] So it's just taking longer.
[00:27:50.280 --> 00:27:51.800] You need to brainstorm.
[00:27:51.800 --> 00:27:55.240] You know, in the beginning, it's just, let's say, me and a designer, right?
[00:27:55.240 --> 00:27:57.960] We just, okay, on the fly, we take decisions.
[00:27:57.960 --> 00:28:01.400] But now you have, oh, we have a head of brand, so you want to hear the brand.
[00:28:01.640 --> 00:28:04.440] We have the CMO, so you want to hear there, the head of content.
[00:28:04.920 --> 00:28:09.080] It will be kind of a shame if you don't use them because they're smart people.
[00:28:09.080 --> 00:28:11.560] But it just makes everything much slower.
[00:28:11.560 --> 00:28:16.800] So, yes, we could use more people, and this is why we're hiring.
[00:28:17.120 --> 00:28:28.000] I would say that also, unlike mega corporate, like we can move faster, and also we don't like we are okay with some risks.
[00:28:28.000 --> 00:28:43.360] We have some exposures that we're just living with, you know, and it's okay when we get to a bigger size or the exposure is bigger enough, like we can deal with worst case, we will take the penalty, you know, of whatever it is.
[00:28:43.360 --> 00:28:46.080] So, we're risk takers as a smaller team.
[00:28:46.080 --> 00:28:49.120] That resonates with me because that's just what founders do, right?
[00:28:49.120 --> 00:28:55.760] Like, if you serve founders, you might just as well be one, you know, and be a little on the entrepreneurial risk-take side.
[00:28:55.760 --> 00:28:56.960] Makes perfect sense to me.
[00:28:56.960 --> 00:29:01.280] And I think it also impacts how you decide what to do with the business and what you don't do.
[00:29:01.280 --> 00:29:06.400] It feels like you could do everything and even further expose yourself to risks.
[00:29:06.400 --> 00:29:14.320] But when I look at the product and I look at how you present and position yourself, it is very clear that you're hyper-focused on a specific kind of the market.
[00:29:14.320 --> 00:29:17.680] And the features that you offer are also focused on this.
[00:29:17.680 --> 00:29:22.160] You're not trying to be the solution for everybody everywhere at all times, right?
[00:29:22.160 --> 00:29:26.240] You're very, very specific in how you approach selling product over the internet.
[00:29:26.240 --> 00:29:38.400] So, I wonder: did you ever consciously choose to not build something that somebody else may have, but you found like this is something that we don't want to look into, that we don't need to extend resources into?
[00:29:38.400 --> 00:29:39.680] Yeah, yeah, absolutely.
[00:29:39.680 --> 00:29:42.880] We have, we're limited, you know, we can't just build everything.
[00:29:42.880 --> 00:29:50.320] A very common and complementary request that coming is, why can't we sell services?
[00:29:50.320 --> 00:29:50.720] Right?
[00:29:50.720 --> 00:29:54.560] I'm building a product, but I'm doing some customization work for a client.
[00:29:54.560 --> 00:29:57.520] So, why can't we also sell services on top of that?
[00:29:57.520 --> 00:29:59.520] They already, like, we already have the checkout there.
[00:29:59.520 --> 00:30:10.440] It's just about let's add another product and plan, but it adds additional exposure and complexities and legal stuff and taxes that we just don't want to get into.
[00:30:10.600 --> 00:30:13.000] This is not our bread and butter.
[00:30:13.000 --> 00:30:35.800] I do feel that maybe in the future, once we accomplish all the big things that we want to do with selling software, maybe we can do some expansion to services, but you can't be us plus offer an upwork, leaving the marketplace aside, but all the entire process of hiring like service providers in parallel with 20 team members.
[00:30:35.800 --> 00:30:37.480] It's just not feasible.
[00:30:37.480 --> 00:30:42.840] Yeah, and I think that makes you different in a very good way because you're not even trying to chase that.
[00:30:42.840 --> 00:30:53.560] Like, you know what you can do, you know what you can do well, and you know where, if you were to put like resources into this, it would kind of be a waste of your time, at least now, right?
[00:30:53.560 --> 00:30:56.360] At least for the existing team, the existing business.
[00:30:56.360 --> 00:31:01.240] How else are you different from like the existing payment providers in the field?
[00:31:01.240 --> 00:31:11.800] So, the same way that we didn't start with we want to be an MOR, the vision was we want to solve the whole commercial aspects of selling software globally, not locally.
[00:31:11.800 --> 00:31:15.240] Locally, it's easier, it's a different set of problems.
[00:31:15.560 --> 00:31:33.160] And one thing that we notice is that software makers are really good at coding, you know, they can put the checkout, the billing maybe, but they're not good in many other aspects like marketing and pricing and packaging and all this stuff.
[00:31:33.120 --> 00:31:40.600] Like, like they need some guidance, or preferably, those things should come built in as part of the solution.
[00:31:40.600 --> 00:31:53.920] So, the way we look on the problem is we're not only solving like the payment or the billing side of things, we're looking on the entire customer life cycle from before they buy until they cancel and after.
[00:31:54.240 --> 00:32:00.000] So, someone starts a checkout and they abandon before even entering your email.
[00:32:00.000 --> 00:32:02.880] With Freemuse, you can show an exit intent pop-up.
[00:32:02.880 --> 00:32:06.240] When someone does enter their email, there is a card recovery.
[00:32:06.240 --> 00:32:09.680] So, this is like pre-purchase kind of interactions.
[00:32:09.680 --> 00:32:25.840] So, I would say there is a lot of touch points in the life cycle of a customer that through those micro interactions, you can reduce churn, increase customer lifetime value, recover people to get back into subscription.
[00:32:25.840 --> 00:32:29.360] So, when they go to cancellation, we have some retention flow.
[00:32:29.360 --> 00:32:39.280] Even if they cancel, when they get to license ending to the like the period of their subscription, we kind of re-encourage them, try to recover that subscription.
[00:32:39.280 --> 00:32:46.560] So, there's a lot of those micro interactions through emails, through the checkout, through the customer portal.
[00:32:46.560 --> 00:32:50.080] And with Freemuse, we tackle it automatically out of the box.
[00:32:50.080 --> 00:32:52.000] So, you don't need to think about stuff.
[00:32:52.000 --> 00:32:54.400] And we keep adding those as we go.
[00:32:54.400 --> 00:33:00.560] So, a big part of the solution is focused on conversion rate optimization and marketing automation built in.
[00:33:00.560 --> 00:33:06.560] So, you don't need to plug, convert kit, and start thinking: oh, how do I phrase that email?
[00:33:06.560 --> 00:33:07.280] What is the email?
[00:33:07.360 --> 00:33:10.240] In what event do I need to trigger that email?
[00:33:10.240 --> 00:33:13.520] So, this is all coming out of the box.
[00:33:13.520 --> 00:33:18.240] And the alignment in interest is there because it's a revenue share model.
[00:33:18.240 --> 00:33:24.400] So, the more we can maximize your financial potential, we are benefiting from that directly.
[00:33:24.400 --> 00:33:27.520] So, this is like one pillar, how we are different.
[00:33:27.520 --> 00:33:33.320] The second, like I said, people don't necessarily know how to price, package, or to do marketing, etc.
[00:33:29.840 --> 00:33:36.360] So, we take a very proactive approach.
[00:33:36.600 --> 00:33:43.720] We do a lot of educational guidance through our different channels: video, blog, podcasting, etc.
[00:33:43.880 --> 00:33:49.080] But we are also happy to open a call with founders and discuss this stuff.
[00:33:49.080 --> 00:33:51.400] So, like, how do you package your product?
[00:33:51.400 --> 00:34:04.600] And I actually was very, very excited when I went to MicroConf and I met Rob because, like, what he's doing through TinySeed is like, I felt so much kind of the same stuff that I'm doing with founders, right?
[00:34:04.680 --> 00:34:06.040] Through Freemis.
[00:34:06.040 --> 00:34:14.520] And we have that interest as well, because if they can, you know, make more money through packaging, then we are benefiting from that.
[00:34:14.520 --> 00:34:20.760] And the last one, give me the third one: is the whole network thing.
[00:34:20.760 --> 00:34:23.400] So, just as MicroCon, right?
[00:34:23.400 --> 00:34:28.040] It is critical in order to succeed in business to have a network.
[00:34:28.040 --> 00:34:30.200] So, network is a big thing for us.
[00:34:30.200 --> 00:34:38.920] The third pillar, so we're building that community through a Slack, through physical events that we're doing together.
[00:34:38.920 --> 00:34:49.960] So, we constantly try to create opportunities for makers on our platform to partner with each other, learn from each other in terms of exit opportunities.
[00:34:49.960 --> 00:34:56.280] Because we're connected with many makers, naturally, buyers of businesses want to be connected with us.
[00:34:56.280 --> 00:35:04.520] So, when you want to sell your business, people naturally come to us, to me, saying, Hey, like, do you know someone that could be interested?
[00:35:04.520 --> 00:35:06.520] So, we're also making that connection.
[00:35:06.520 --> 00:35:18.640] So, I mentioned at the beginning, looking on the entire life cycle of the customer, we're also looking on the entire life cycle of your software business from the launch scale to exit.
[00:35:18.640 --> 00:35:23.440] Because in our ecosystem, in Bootstrap world, you don't do IPOs, right?
[00:35:23.440 --> 00:35:26.560] You're most likely going to die or sell.
[00:35:26.560 --> 00:35:31.440] So, hopefully, you get to the sell side of things, and we're there to help you also to sell it.
[00:35:31.440 --> 00:35:34.400] Man, there is so much in these three answers.
[00:35:34.400 --> 00:35:38.400] I think there are three really major lessons that I just want to highlight here again.
[00:35:38.400 --> 00:35:40.400] Because thank you for sharing this.
[00:35:40.400 --> 00:35:46.400] First one, like I was talking about how you don't do this kind of horizontal integration, like going of the services or tests or that.
[00:35:46.400 --> 00:35:48.160] You're doing a full vertical integration.
[00:35:48.160 --> 00:35:52.240] That is amazing because that kind of leads to the second one: the alignment.
[00:35:52.240 --> 00:35:59.520] Like, you understand perfectly what a founder needs, what a software entrepreneur is good at, and may not be good at.
[00:35:59.520 --> 00:36:08.560] So, by taking all this and solving it for them in one like fully verticalized package, you get the alignment because you understand, right?
[00:36:08.560 --> 00:36:18.720] Like, if you were somebody who was just trying to serve that market, but you didn't get the personal perspective, you wouldn't do these things because you would say, ah, they can do this themselves, but you know that they don't like it.
[00:36:18.720 --> 00:36:22.960] You know that they may not even be capable of coming up with the idea of doing it in the first place.
[00:36:22.960 --> 00:36:25.200] So, you take that and solve it for them.
[00:36:25.200 --> 00:36:32.800] And then you build a community of people, like not just on the business level, but on the founder quality of life level.
[00:36:32.800 --> 00:36:33.760] That is really cool.
[00:36:33.760 --> 00:36:36.160] Like, that is a very special kind of customer service.
[00:36:36.160 --> 00:36:41.920] If you don't just want to help them solve their problem, but you actually want to allow them to have a life-changing exit.
[00:36:41.920 --> 00:36:45.520] And we also have an affiliate platform as part of Fremius.
[00:36:45.520 --> 00:36:50.960] So, we naturally, over the years, built connections with affiliates.
[00:36:50.960 --> 00:36:54.560] So, we are also happy to facilitate connections to affiliates.
[00:36:54.560 --> 00:37:00.000] So, if there's some YouTuber that in our network and you have like an exciting product, we can make that connection.
[00:37:00.360 --> 00:37:12.440] And we're doing this event called Makers Meetup, where previously it was focused on bringing just like software makers, but now we start to bring influencers as well because it's like mutually beneficial, right?
[00:37:12.760 --> 00:37:14.920] They are looking for products to promote.
[00:37:14.920 --> 00:37:17.000] Founders are looking for them.
[00:37:17.000 --> 00:37:22.200] So we started to kind of grow that program as well, basically creating opportunities.
[00:37:22.520 --> 00:37:31.240] Once you really focus on a specific vertical, and the entire kind of life cycle of that vertical, opportunities come in.
[00:37:31.240 --> 00:37:36.280] We have like PERCS network, people who want to offer their services for that audience.
[00:37:36.280 --> 00:37:39.880] So they're willing to, you know, offer exclusive discounts.
[00:37:39.880 --> 00:37:42.040] So we have that in the dashboard as well.
[00:37:42.040 --> 00:37:48.680] And we try to focus on solutions that are really relevant to our audience and not just, you know, anything out there.
[00:37:48.680 --> 00:37:52.920] So you get a lot, a lot of value, and we keep adding more of that.
[00:37:52.920 --> 00:37:57.640] And I can also say that, like you said, that we know how to help them.
[00:37:57.640 --> 00:38:00.440] Yes, because we've been through the journey, right?
[00:38:00.440 --> 00:38:16.440] And this is why we're all, it feels that like our audience is pushing us to grow as well, because we're acquiring all this knowledge, experience, and data, right, that we can pass over to help them be more successful in their business.
[00:38:16.440 --> 00:38:21.960] Yeah, you're definitely facilitating growth and growing yourself as a consequence of that.
[00:38:21.960 --> 00:38:22.920] That is amazing.
[00:38:22.920 --> 00:38:27.560] And one thing that really stands out is how you do not shy away from connecting.
[00:38:27.560 --> 00:38:29.720] Like that's something, and you said it, introvert, right?
[00:38:29.720 --> 00:38:31.080] Introverts tend to stay at home.
[00:38:31.080 --> 00:38:46.160] You know, we sit on the couch, we read our books, we do our computer stuff, but to be out there and connecting people, like both in terms of connecting your customers with their customers and then connecting your customers with other people like them, and then connecting them with a potential acquirer and so on.
[00:38:46.480 --> 00:38:58.080] That is an intentional effort that I'm really, really happy you're doing because this is what a founder really is: a connector, like a facilitator, somebody who becomes part of a community or fosters community in the first place.
[00:38:58.080 --> 00:38:59.360] So that is amazing.
[00:38:59.360 --> 00:39:10.480] And it brings me to, let's call it my last question: if people want to connect with you and learn more about the business and learn more about the events that you are at or that you are facilitating, where do you think they should go?
[00:39:10.480 --> 00:39:13.760] Where should they check on Freemuse News and news of Vova?
[00:39:13.760 --> 00:39:16.880] Yeah, so we're pretty active on all social networks.
[00:39:16.880 --> 00:39:21.920] I would say mostly on X and LinkedIn, also experimenting with Blue Sky.
[00:39:21.920 --> 00:39:27.920] So for me personally, Vova Feldman, I guess it will be written somewhere in the notes.
[00:39:27.920 --> 00:39:32.240] So you can find how to spell that or Freemuse.
[00:39:32.240 --> 00:39:34.320] We're also very active on YouTube.
[00:39:34.320 --> 00:39:37.680] So we constantly push content out there on the blog.
[00:39:37.680 --> 00:39:47.440] We have a podcast called plugin.fm, which brings basically founders that have some unique experience.
[00:39:47.440 --> 00:39:55.840] And we focus on that first-hand experience and trying to kind of distill actionable, you know, things that you can take out of every episode.
[00:39:55.840 --> 00:40:06.400] We had people like Jason Cohen, Matt Bollenweg, Arvid, of course, talking about the whole building public ecosystem.
[00:40:06.400 --> 00:40:08.400] Amazing episode, by the way.
[00:40:08.400 --> 00:40:10.160] Also, feel free to email me.
[00:40:10.160 --> 00:40:11.360] Honestly, I'm available.
[00:40:11.360 --> 00:40:14.080] So it's Vova at Freemuse.com.
[00:40:14.080 --> 00:40:16.480] You are available and you're present in the community.
[00:40:16.480 --> 00:40:17.840] I really appreciate that.
[00:40:17.840 --> 00:40:21.760] And thank you for sharing all these insights into Freemius and your journey today.
[00:40:21.760 --> 00:40:24.640] I think that is, I'm still very inspired by this.
[00:40:24.640 --> 00:40:30.120] I was glad to meet you at the conference and I'm super happy that you got to share 10 years, man.
[00:40:30.120 --> 00:40:34.440] That is a lot of time and a lot of time building something really, really cool.
[00:40:34.440 --> 00:40:35.000] Appreciate it.
[00:40:29.840 --> 00:40:36.280] Thank you so much for coming on the show.
[00:40:36.600 --> 00:40:37.480] Thanks for having me.
[00:40:37.480 --> 00:40:38.520] It was really awesome.
[00:40:38.520 --> 00:40:39.480] Appreciate that.
[00:40:39.480 --> 00:40:40.680] And that's it for today.
[00:40:40.680 --> 00:40:42.920] Thank you so much for listening to the Bootstrap Founder.
[00:40:42.920 --> 00:40:46.440] You can find me on Twitter at Avitkal, A-R-V-I-D, K-A-H-L.
[00:40:46.440 --> 00:40:59.320] And if you want to support me in this show, please share podscan.fm, my SaaS business, with your professional peers and those who you think will benefit from tracking mentions of their brands, their businesses, their names on podcasts out there.
[00:40:59.320 --> 00:41:03.720] PodScan is a near real-time podcast database with a stellar API.
[00:41:03.720 --> 00:41:06.920] We have 32 million podcast episodes in the back now.
[00:41:06.920 --> 00:41:08.840] The database is humongous.
[00:41:08.840 --> 00:41:13.080] Please share the word with those who need to stay on top of the podcast ecosystem.
[00:41:13.080 --> 00:41:14.520] Thank you so much for listening.
[00:41:14.520 --> 00:41:17.000] Have a wonderful day and bye-bye.

Prompt 2: Key Takeaways

Now please extract the key takeaways from the transcript content I provided.

Extract the most important key takeaways from this part of the conversation. Use a single sentence statement (the key takeaway) rather than milquetoast descriptions like "the hosts discuss...". 

Limit the key takeaways to a maximum of 3. The key takeaways should be insightful and knowledge-additive. 

IMPORTANT: Return ONLY valid JSON, no explanations or markdown. Ensure:
- All strings are properly quoted and escaped
- No trailing commas
- All braces and brackets are balanced
Format: {"key_takeaways": ["takeaway 1", "takeaway 2"]}

Prompt 3: Segments

Now identify 2-4 distinct topical segments from this part of the conversation.

For each segment, identify:
- Descriptive title (3-6 words)  
- START timestamp when this topic begins (HH:MM:SS format)
- Double check that the timestamp is accurate - a timestamp will NEVER be greater than the total length of the audio
- Most important Key takeaway from that segment. Key takeaway must be specific and knowledge-additive.
- Brief summary of the discussion

IMPORTANT: The timestamp should mark when the topic/segment STARTS, not a range. Look for topic transitions and conversation shifts.

Return ONLY valid JSON. Ensure all strings are properly quoted, no trailing commas:
{
  "segments": [
    {
      "segment_title": "Topic Discussion", 
      "timestamp": "01:15:30",
      "key_takeaway": "main point from this segment",
      "segment_summary": "brief description of what was discussed"
    }
  ]
}

Timestamp format: HH:MM:SS (e.g., 00:05:30, 01:22:45) marking the START of each segment.

Prompt 4: Media Mentions

Now scan the transcript content I provided for ACTUAL mentions of specific media titles:

Find explicit mentions of:
- Books (with specific titles)
- Movies (with specific titles)  
- TV Shows (with specific titles)
- Music/Songs (with specific titles)

DO NOT include:
- Websites, URLs, or web services
- Other podcasts or podcast names

IMPORTANT: 
- Only include items explicitly mentioned by name. Do not invent titles.
- Valid categories are: "Book", "Movie", "TV Show", "Music"
- Include the exact phrase where each item was mentioned
- Find the nearest proximate timestamp where it appears in the conversation
- THE TIMESTAMP OF THE MEDIA MENTION IS IMPORTANT - DO NOT INVENT TIMESTAMPS AND DO NOT MISATTRIBUTE TIMESTAMPS
- Double check that the timestamp is accurate - a timestamp will NEVER be greater than the total length of the audio
- Timestamps are given as ranges, e.g. 01:13:42.520 --> 01:13:46.720. Use the EARLIER of the 2 timestamps in the range.

Return ONLY valid JSON. Ensure all strings are properly quoted and escaped, no trailing commas:
{
  "media_mentions": [
    {
      "title": "Exact Title as Mentioned",
      "category": "Book",
      "author_artist": "N/A",
      "context": "Brief context of why it was mentioned",
      "context_phrase": "The exact sentence or phrase where it was mentioned",
      "timestamp": "estimated time like 01:15:30"
    }
  ]
}

If no media is mentioned, return: {"media_mentions": []}

Full Transcript

[00:00:00.400 --> 00:00:04.480] Hey, it's Arvid, and this is the Bootstrap Founder.
[00:00:08.960 --> 00:00:13.840] Today, I'm talking to Vova Feldman of the Merchant of Record payment provider Freemius.
[00:00:13.840 --> 00:00:22.240] I've met Vova a lot of times over the last several couple conferences I went to, and I thought it was time to bring him on the show and chat.
[00:00:22.240 --> 00:00:36.480] We talk about how hard it is to run a business that deals with payments in a very competitive space, how to build a team, how to build a good team, and how to find the right people for the right jobs and dealing with those early hires that just didn't work out.
[00:00:36.480 --> 00:00:50.000] We also talk about generating the energy to stay on course for many, many years, the choice between bootstrapping and raising capital, and how to be an involved founder still while giving space to your employees to do their best work.
[00:00:50.000 --> 00:00:50.960] Let's dive in.
[00:00:50.960 --> 00:00:54.160] Here's Vova.
[00:00:54.160 --> 00:00:56.400] Vova, hi, and welcome to the show.
[00:00:56.400 --> 00:00:59.040] You've been bootstrapping for 10 years now.
[00:00:59.040 --> 00:01:00.640] Now, that is mighty impressive.
[00:01:00.640 --> 00:01:02.720] Most people really don't make it anywhere.
[00:01:02.720 --> 00:01:07.760] They give up after the first couple months, if not a couple of weeks, even if they don't see results.
[00:01:07.760 --> 00:01:10.000] How did you stick around for this long?
[00:01:10.000 --> 00:01:12.000] Yeah, it's a really great question.
[00:01:12.320 --> 00:01:18.880] I think the first main reason for that is that I'm really excited about the problem that I'm solving.
[00:01:18.880 --> 00:01:21.600] It's something that I personally faced.
[00:01:21.600 --> 00:01:27.040] I built this micro SAS and a pass and try to monetize that, joined with another guy.
[00:01:27.040 --> 00:01:29.280] We spent like a year working on it.
[00:01:29.280 --> 00:01:39.600] And in the end, we kind of discovered that basically the whole like monetization part of things is way more complex and time-consuming than actually building the product.
[00:01:39.600 --> 00:01:45.520] So that got me to this like realization that there is a bigger problem and something that I solved.
[00:01:45.520 --> 00:01:53.440] So I was very passionate to basically take something that I faced and try to bring it to the world.
[00:01:53.440 --> 00:01:59.720] Another thing is focusing on the target audience that I personally relate with.
[00:01:59.720 --> 00:02:02.360] It's like people like me, right?
[00:01:59.280 --> 00:02:05.800] So I know the language, I know the people.
[00:02:06.280 --> 00:02:14.440] I like to hang with those people to, you know, have a beer and a conference together, chat about business challenges.
[00:02:14.440 --> 00:02:19.480] So the problem and the audience are very close to my heart.
[00:02:19.480 --> 00:02:23.640] Another thing is having a very big vision.
[00:02:23.640 --> 00:02:31.480] I think that at least for me, and I think many people who are, you know, founders, they're basically high achievers.
[00:02:31.480 --> 00:02:33.320] They want to do great things.
[00:02:33.640 --> 00:02:40.680] And what really pushes them is constantly growing, learning new things, and building something bigger.
[00:02:40.680 --> 00:02:49.160] And if your vision, mission is like quite small, you get to a certain point that you feel, okay, what's next?
[00:02:49.160 --> 00:03:00.200] I don't know like whether you're growing or not, but in terms of like the product development, you feel that you kind of maxed out and you have that each, okay, I want to move to the next thing.
[00:03:00.200 --> 00:03:14.360] So what happened to me personally, I'm coming from like a traditional startup background, went through like the VC route and startup accelerators, being in TechSource Boston, another accelerator in Silicon Valley.
[00:03:14.360 --> 00:03:17.880] So when I started with Frame Use, that was my natural route.
[00:03:17.880 --> 00:03:18.840] This is what I knew.
[00:03:18.840 --> 00:03:26.200] I opened a US incorporation, no LC, straight to, you know, had a stock option for future employees.
[00:03:26.200 --> 00:03:29.480] It was all based on the template that I learned.
[00:03:29.480 --> 00:03:33.080] And I went to this hunt of, you know, raising money.
[00:03:33.080 --> 00:03:36.600] I went to the Silicon Valley, to Boston area.
[00:03:36.600 --> 00:03:42.360] And in order to pitch to VCs, you have to have a grand vision, right?
[00:03:42.360 --> 00:03:44.360] To show that mega market.
[00:03:44.360 --> 00:03:51.040] And you can't just pitch what most of us are doing, kind of starting very small, validating.
[00:03:44.760 --> 00:03:52.080] It's just not enough.
[00:03:52.400 --> 00:03:56.400] So you have to force yourself thinking about a much bigger problem.
[00:03:56.400 --> 00:03:58.000] Like, okay, this is what I'm tackling.
[00:03:58.000 --> 00:03:59.680] The story needs to make sense, right?
[00:03:59.680 --> 00:04:04.720] You have to show this billion-dollar opportunity in order to be fundable.
[00:04:05.040 --> 00:04:12.080] So it pushes you to think further down the line in a way that maybe you'll never get there, right?
[00:04:12.080 --> 00:04:16.560] But there is always some like further path to go to.
[00:04:16.560 --> 00:04:22.800] So I think like we've been focused on specific ecosystem, which is WordPress for so many years.
[00:04:23.120 --> 00:04:32.960] But because of going through that initial phase of creating the, you know, the pitch deck to investors, I always had that, okay, what would be the next kind of ecosystem?
[00:04:32.960 --> 00:04:38.480] And we only now, after like nine years, we got to that next phase, right?
[00:04:38.480 --> 00:04:51.040] So it took a very long period, but it's not boring because now we're kind of, it's not really starting from scratch, but the excitement is like, I'm seeing the team, I see myself.
[00:04:51.040 --> 00:04:54.960] It's like gave us so much energy to get into this whole new ecosystem.
[00:04:54.960 --> 00:04:59.200] So I think having that long-term kind of vision, it's important.
[00:04:59.200 --> 00:05:04.000] It does add an overhead in the beginning because you need to think through this stuff.
[00:05:04.000 --> 00:05:07.040] But I feel that it's definitely worth it.
[00:05:07.360 --> 00:05:13.280] Another thing that I can think of is that I managed to grow a team.
[00:05:13.280 --> 00:05:18.480] So when you're just alone, it's like really hard to grind for 10 years.
[00:05:18.520 --> 00:05:31.320] You know, like I remember it took me probably seven years until I was able to delegate, like to take off my engineering hat, to pass it over to other team members.
[00:05:29.920 --> 00:05:34.200] And the support probably took me like five years.
[00:05:34.360 --> 00:05:41.640] So it means every time my wife and I were going to vacation, I'm doing health scout tickets in the morning, in the evening.
[00:05:41.960 --> 00:05:44.360] You can't do it for 10 years, you know?
[00:05:44.680 --> 00:05:45.640] I know, man.
[00:05:45.640 --> 00:05:48.680] Unless you have an extremely patient partner.
[00:05:48.680 --> 00:05:51.800] And maybe also somebody who really gets what you're doing.
[00:05:51.800 --> 00:05:53.080] Like, I'm fortunate with that.
[00:05:53.080 --> 00:05:55.880] Like, my partner, we had a business together, like a software business.
[00:05:55.880 --> 00:05:59.320] She gets totally what this is about and why it works.
[00:05:59.320 --> 00:06:05.880] And still, I want to get into the delegating part much quicker than five years with this thing that I'm building right now.
[00:06:05.880 --> 00:06:09.400] Because I know, like, it is stressful and it is anxiety inducing.
[00:06:09.400 --> 00:06:12.040] And everything I hear you say makes perfect sense to me.
[00:06:12.040 --> 00:06:22.040] Like, have this vision, have interest in the people that you're serving, have an understanding of the actual need, and also be able to give part of the work to other people.
[00:06:22.040 --> 00:06:30.200] Yet, when you put them all together and you're only one person, like all of this is super overwhelming because you have to deal with everything at the same time.
[00:06:30.200 --> 00:06:32.200] Did you put these things in a certain order?
[00:06:32.200 --> 00:06:35.560] Like, did you have a priority when it came to vision first?
[00:06:35.560 --> 00:06:37.240] And then I think about the other thing.
[00:06:37.240 --> 00:06:39.000] Like, how did you struggle with that?
[00:06:39.000 --> 00:06:41.000] Or how did you organize this in the beginning?
[00:06:41.000 --> 00:06:43.640] Yeah, so the big vision, I was forced, right?
[00:06:43.640 --> 00:06:45.000] Because that's the way that I knew.
[00:06:45.000 --> 00:06:47.800] I went to fundraise before I started to code anything.
[00:06:47.800 --> 00:06:49.080] That was my first thing.
[00:06:49.080 --> 00:06:51.480] So I worked on slides in the beginning.
[00:06:51.720 --> 00:06:53.160] So that's how it started.
[00:06:53.160 --> 00:06:59.080] In terms of the team, I did manage to raise some money, but very small from Angel Investors.
[00:06:59.080 --> 00:07:03.480] And it did help me to get that initial first two years going.
[00:07:03.480 --> 00:07:09.480] But in terms of hiring, as a bootstrap business, you're pretty much limited based on your income.
[00:07:09.800 --> 00:07:16.720] So it was very gradual until we hit a certain point when we had really fast, like rapid growth.
[00:07:17.040 --> 00:07:24.080] And then the challenge was to actually find time to do hiring because that's extremely time consuming.
[00:07:24.080 --> 00:07:30.080] Like in the beginning, when you're, let's say, one, two, three people, it's okay, everything is moving very fast.
[00:07:30.080 --> 00:07:38.800] But once you want to grow a little faster, like you need to train people, but you also have all the other hats that you're wearing, especially if you're growing.
[00:07:39.200 --> 00:07:42.720] It's this like constant battle of, oh, I'm growing the business.
[00:07:42.720 --> 00:07:53.120] I have more money to spend, but now I have more support load from customers because most businesses, it's kind of linear, the support and your growth.
[00:07:53.120 --> 00:08:00.000] And it's hard to keep up with all those, like you said, there are like so many things that you need to do in parallel.
[00:08:00.000 --> 00:08:01.840] It's very challenging.
[00:08:01.840 --> 00:08:09.360] And I can tell you, because of the lack of time and the focus of being the CTO and the CEO and all these, I hired the wrong people.
[00:08:09.360 --> 00:08:10.640] And also lack of budget.
[00:08:10.640 --> 00:08:16.000] In the beginning, if you don't have good budget to hire, so you have to compromise.
[00:08:16.000 --> 00:08:20.160] You have to get junior people in the beginning and you need to train them.
[00:08:20.160 --> 00:08:23.840] So you also need to become an expert in everything, which is kind of insane, right?
[00:08:23.840 --> 00:08:30.800] Because I learned how to be a marketer and SEO and a developer, a product person, a recruiter.
[00:08:30.800 --> 00:08:32.720] And I mean, it's awesome.
[00:08:32.720 --> 00:08:36.640] It's awesome that you acquire all those skills, but it's also crazy.
[00:08:36.640 --> 00:08:44.880] And I want to say that with age, maybe, you know, if you're 20 years old, you have 40, 16 hours per day.
[00:08:45.200 --> 00:08:58.080] But when you get to the 40s, which is a lot of our, you know, of the people that I met in Microcon, my age, right, you already have kids and you can't work so much, period.
[00:08:58.080 --> 00:09:00.000] It's just unrealistic.
[00:09:00.280 --> 00:09:09.560] So the fact that I could take three weeks off completely and be with my wife and my baby, he was born, is because I had a team.
[00:09:09.880 --> 00:09:13.880] And that event actually put me, like forced me.
[00:09:13.880 --> 00:09:15.400] to build a strong team.
[00:09:15.400 --> 00:09:18.760] Like I knew that I need to be able to do that, right?
[00:09:18.760 --> 00:09:23.880] So for about a year since we got pregnant, you know, it was that was my focus.
[00:09:23.880 --> 00:09:32.600] I need to bring people so I can, you know, if I out for three weeks, the business is running, plus everyone knows what they need to do.
[00:09:32.600 --> 00:09:40.920] So it's not that, of course, when I'm there, it's like I'm able to push everyone, you know, to the right direction, moving faster and everything.
[00:09:40.920 --> 00:09:59.240] But that was kind of the time when I started to think more about, okay, annual planning and everyone needs to know exactly what they need to do and being less like opportunistic and kind of improvising on the fly, but actually being more methodological in terms of, okay, roadmap, we have to stick with it.
[00:09:59.240 --> 00:10:00.840] This is what everyone doing.
[00:10:00.840 --> 00:10:06.600] So all those life changes, they're forcing you to do some things.
[00:10:06.600 --> 00:10:10.680] But it's awesome because also for me, you know, like I love coding.
[00:10:10.680 --> 00:10:13.480] I don't do it anymore, unfortunately.
[00:10:13.480 --> 00:10:15.080] I really miss that.
[00:10:15.080 --> 00:10:17.720] But I acquired so many new skills right now.
[00:10:18.040 --> 00:10:27.320] So today I'm focused on recruitment, on talking, doing podcasting, all those things that like you may find it surprising.
[00:10:27.320 --> 00:10:30.760] I'm introvert, like many people in our ecosystem.
[00:10:30.760 --> 00:10:35.720] But once you go to 100 conferences, you learn how to talk with people.
[00:10:35.720 --> 00:10:41.800] Yeah, I could tell when I met you in MicroConf this time around this year that you're comfortable there, right?
[00:10:41.800 --> 00:10:51.920] Like you enjoy the company of your fellow founders and hanging out with them and talking shop with them and inviting them to do stuff and having chats with them, like this one too.
[00:10:51.920 --> 00:10:52.560] That is cool.
[00:10:52.560 --> 00:10:58.000] And I love in all of this that this is something you don't delegate, that that's something you actually still do yourself, right?
[00:10:58.000 --> 00:11:06.720] Like going to a conference and showing up with swag and handing it out to people and talking about the business and asking questions, like making partnerships happen.
[00:11:06.720 --> 00:11:12.480] That is something that to me often sounds like, oh, yeah, that's what business development people do, right?
[00:11:12.480 --> 00:11:14.720] That's what this particular part of the business is.
[00:11:14.880 --> 00:11:17.600] Well, I'm still wearing that hat, you know, the business development.
[00:11:18.000 --> 00:11:18.800] Exactly.
[00:11:18.800 --> 00:11:20.080] That's exactly what it is.
[00:11:20.080 --> 00:11:27.520] Like, that's the hat you haven't given up because, in your case, like, you are a person that really gets your peers and you sell to peers, right?
[00:11:27.520 --> 00:11:29.920] You sell to entrepreneurs, you sell to founders.
[00:11:29.920 --> 00:11:34.240] So it would be a waste of your connection with them to not do this yourself.
[00:11:34.240 --> 00:11:41.760] Man, I love this kind of dichotomy of delegating because, on the one hand, you build a business like a founder, like became pregnant, need to change stuff.
[00:11:41.760 --> 00:11:42.640] What's my runway?
[00:11:42.640 --> 00:11:43.200] Nine months.
[00:11:43.200 --> 00:11:44.480] Okay, gotta fix this, right?
[00:11:44.480 --> 00:11:48.960] This is such a founder mode of changing your own business as well.
[00:11:48.960 --> 00:11:59.920] And then on the other hand, you do things still that other people probably would have delegated because you know the benefits of doing this as a founder-led activity outweighs the benefit of hiring somebody for it.
[00:11:59.920 --> 00:12:01.120] So it's kind of a balance here.
[00:12:01.120 --> 00:12:02.480] I find it very interesting.
[00:12:02.480 --> 00:12:04.640] That's a very bootstrapper mentality thing.
[00:12:04.640 --> 00:12:07.760] And I'm glad that even 10 years into this, you haven't given that up.
[00:12:07.760 --> 00:12:12.080] I think that's very inspirational to see that you can retain this as a founder.
[00:12:12.080 --> 00:12:14.640] You can retain this approach to, let's see, right?
[00:12:14.640 --> 00:12:16.320] Okay, I have this amount of time.
[00:12:16.320 --> 00:12:17.920] I have these kind of skills.
[00:12:17.920 --> 00:12:19.360] Let's put them to use.
[00:12:19.360 --> 00:12:34.440] And since you were wearing all these hats and you're saying you still wear some and you're trying to give away the others, coding, for example, I mean, show me a really good software developer that actually is still coding and not just like maintaining an AI trying to code for them at this point, right?
[00:12:34.440 --> 00:12:48.280] I think most devs that are trying to produce code for a living to build a business have embraced AI just as a junior working for them or a senior that is occasionally going into the absolute wrong direction.
[00:12:48.280 --> 00:12:50.440] But let's maybe leave that part aside.
[00:12:50.440 --> 00:12:53.560] So most people who code don't really code that much anymore.
[00:12:53.560 --> 00:12:59.880] A lot of that is just, you know, being a technical leader in the team, and the team members are all virtual.
[00:12:59.880 --> 00:13:07.160] How much do you use AI in your many different hat-wearing capacities at this point?
[00:13:07.160 --> 00:13:08.040] A lot.
[00:13:08.040 --> 00:13:09.800] A lot, honestly.
[00:13:09.800 --> 00:13:12.600] I mean, not in coding because I don't do that anymore.
[00:13:12.600 --> 00:13:18.440] And I think the part that I'm most passionate about in coding, it's not the coding itself, it's the creation, right?
[00:13:18.440 --> 00:13:21.800] Because it's like 100% productivity.
[00:13:21.800 --> 00:13:26.040] There's no other job in the world that is so productive, like coding.
[00:13:26.040 --> 00:13:29.160] So I think that that part I'm really kind of missing.
[00:13:29.160 --> 00:13:46.120] But in terms of using AI, I'm man, I'm talking with ChatGPT the entire day, like honestly, because a lot of my work is writing and creating processes, direction, and it's a lot of communications.
[00:13:46.120 --> 00:13:49.560] And this is what AI is really good at.
[00:13:49.560 --> 00:13:51.320] And it saves me tons of time.
[00:13:51.320 --> 00:14:00.040] So I can give an example that earlier this year, we went through a proper OKRs process.
[00:14:00.040 --> 00:14:06.280] Kind of with Grind, we wanted to, okay, we are getting into like new market, let's do it the right way.
[00:14:06.600 --> 00:14:12.280] And in the beginning, I had a guy that was supposed to become my COO.
[00:14:12.280 --> 00:14:16.560] He left the company, but in the beginning, he kind of supported that process.
[00:14:16.560 --> 00:14:17.600] And then he left.
[00:14:17.840 --> 00:14:21.760] He did train me a little bit, but I was still missing information.
[00:14:21.760 --> 00:14:27.680] And that's where AI really helped me kind of fill all the missing gaps in the process.
[00:14:27.680 --> 00:14:36.960] So it helped me guiding us through a strategic process of how to do it, the terminology, why we do some things, why is this the practice, etc.
[00:14:37.040 --> 00:14:42.400] Instead of going, and I did a little course as well, but this is like more practical.
[00:14:42.400 --> 00:14:44.960] You know, it gives you what needs to be done.
[00:14:44.960 --> 00:14:48.240] And it is just, yeah, I use AI a lot.
[00:14:48.240 --> 00:14:53.840] Do you see replacing humans in a particular job, like a COO?
[00:14:53.840 --> 00:14:56.400] Do you think this can be completely agentic at some point?
[00:14:56.400 --> 00:15:00.080] Like in the near future, I know that 20 years from now, you know, who knows?
[00:15:00.080 --> 00:15:09.200] I mean, we probably don't even know what's going to happen next year, but within the next couple of months and years, do you see actual AI systems replacing people like in a business like yours?
[00:15:09.200 --> 00:15:10.720] Or do you still want people there?
[00:15:10.720 --> 00:15:12.480] I definitely want people there.
[00:15:12.480 --> 00:15:14.000] I want senior people.
[00:15:14.000 --> 00:15:19.280] This is also something that I realized that there is a like I'm looking for A players.
[00:15:19.280 --> 00:15:20.720] You know, I try different things.
[00:15:20.720 --> 00:15:27.680] If you can, if you have the budget for A players and you're able to get them, it's a game changer completely.
[00:15:27.680 --> 00:15:34.560] Bringing peers that can, you know, think with you together and you're not just telling them what to do.
[00:15:34.560 --> 00:15:39.200] And they're way better than what you're doing, whatever role that you're hiring them for.
[00:15:39.200 --> 00:15:42.080] This is a game changer, and this is what I'm aiming for.
[00:15:42.080 --> 00:15:46.160] I think that AI does remove some jobs.
[00:15:46.560 --> 00:15:50.880] Some jobs will disappear and move to AI, especially with agents.
[00:15:51.200 --> 00:15:59.760] I definitely think that you still need the human side of things, but some roles will disappear, you know?
[00:15:59.760 --> 00:16:00.600] Yeah, for sure.
[00:16:00.920 --> 00:16:02.360] Things in the balance, right?
[00:16:02.360 --> 00:16:22.200] You don't really know where the software development is going, like as an actual job, if it's going to be more of I'm monitoring a fleet of virtual developers and whichever result is the best is going to be what makes it into the code base, or if you actually still have people handcrafting code and that is something that is completely AI-less and people pay for that.
[00:16:22.200 --> 00:16:24.040] Who knows where this is going to go?
[00:16:24.040 --> 00:16:27.640] I appreciate that you speak about humans.
[00:16:27.640 --> 00:16:31.640] Like when you say a players, I see like somebody who really cares, right?
[00:16:31.640 --> 00:16:38.600] It's somebody who has this internal deep motivation to do a great job because they know that they have an impact on other people.
[00:16:38.600 --> 00:16:46.520] And I feel that's something that AI does not have in the sense that it is soulless in the best sense of the word, right?
[00:16:46.520 --> 00:16:53.960] It doesn't have like a deep internal drive other than to take over the world, maybe.
[00:16:53.960 --> 00:16:57.000] But you know, like LLMs try to convince you that they're right.
[00:16:57.000 --> 00:17:00.840] That is not the same as somebody who's motivated to make an impact on the world.
[00:17:00.840 --> 00:17:03.480] So where did you find the people that you hired for Freemius?
[00:17:03.480 --> 00:17:06.520] Because that's one of the things about hiring that freaks me out.
[00:17:06.520 --> 00:17:07.560] I don't know where to look.
[00:17:07.560 --> 00:17:15.560] So we're completely like remote all over the world, as long as you can work European working hours, because that's something that we found.
[00:17:15.560 --> 00:17:17.160] We have to work at the same time.
[00:17:17.160 --> 00:17:20.200] Otherwise, at least for us, it is not working.
[00:17:20.200 --> 00:17:27.880] Like, this is how I build Freemius, and we want to be in sync and run as efficiently as possible.
[00:17:27.880 --> 00:17:32.360] And I got people through different channels.
[00:17:32.360 --> 00:17:54.080] And I think the best and the easiest hires are from referrals from other team members that, you know, worked with a person in a previous job, and it saves the time to hire them because they can just, you know, they already qualified and just by, you know, kind of a trust, you know, someone you trust, a trust third person.
[00:17:54.400 --> 00:17:58.560] But I also found amazing people through other channels.
[00:17:58.560 --> 00:18:04.000] You know, some of them were using Freemuse, so people in the ecosystem.
[00:18:04.000 --> 00:18:07.920] I am looking for people, at least in our size, we're at 20 right now.
[00:18:08.240 --> 00:18:22.800] We're still small, and I do care to bring people that care about our mission, that are really motivated beyond doing an exceptional job for themselves, but also get excited about the problem we're solving, the people we're serving.
[00:18:22.800 --> 00:18:27.120] So they'll have that passion beyond just, you know, executing their job.
[00:18:27.120 --> 00:18:28.960] So this is a critical part for me.
[00:18:28.960 --> 00:18:34.320] And I'm always looking like the hiring process evolved over the years, obviously.
[00:18:34.320 --> 00:18:36.880] But I got some people through my personal network.
[00:18:36.880 --> 00:18:44.240] Like when I was looking for a CTO, I was literally dating with someone on a weekly basis.
[00:18:44.240 --> 00:18:49.840] So it's about sending your, you know, your arms to all your connections.
[00:18:49.840 --> 00:18:59.040] For me, it was the other founders that I know and kind of spreading the word, going to a beer with them, kind of getting them excited about what we're doing.
[00:18:59.040 --> 00:19:05.920] So whenever they meet or know about someone who is technical in that case, they just met me and they're excited about what they're doing.
[00:19:05.920 --> 00:19:08.480] They say, hey, I know this guy, a friend of mine, right?
[00:19:08.480 --> 00:19:10.320] He's working on something exciting.
[00:19:10.320 --> 00:19:11.440] Maybe you should meet.
[00:19:11.440 --> 00:19:13.280] But you have to stay on top of mind.
[00:19:13.280 --> 00:19:18.800] So it took me two years to find a CTO of like a lot of beer drinking, honestly.
[00:19:19.760 --> 00:19:23.040] Well, that's that's suffering that I'm willingly going to do.
[00:19:24.000 --> 00:19:26.000] But yeah, I mean, that is impressive.
[00:19:26.000 --> 00:19:28.080] Like two years of just keeping at it.
[00:19:28.080 --> 00:19:32.920] Again, this is something that most people probably would stop a couple months in, right?
[00:19:32.920 --> 00:19:39.160] That's something that for most people feel, I'm gonna do something else, or I'm gonna get a recruiter to hire one for me.
[00:19:39.160 --> 00:19:40.040] But you stuck with it.
[00:19:40.040 --> 00:19:48.680] That is, I just want to point this out because that is something that I struggle with, like to stay on top of things and just keep doing them even though they don't work.
[00:19:48.680 --> 00:19:51.880] I mean, with Potskin, it took me a year to become profitable.
[00:19:51.880 --> 00:19:55.800] That is enough, like a year of not being profitable and trying to be profitable.
[00:19:55.800 --> 00:19:57.080] That is a lot of work.
[00:19:57.080 --> 00:20:03.320] But doing this for two, doing this for four or five, phew, that would be a lot of stress and anxiety.
[00:20:03.320 --> 00:20:06.680] So, how did you find this motivation like every single day when you did it?
[00:20:06.680 --> 00:20:08.760] Like, what is the driving force?
[00:20:08.920 --> 00:20:18.600] I know you have a mission, and it would be nice if you could actually state that, if you could say, like, exactly what the mission of Freemuse is, because I think that would be very interesting to hear like the nuanced take you have.
[00:20:18.600 --> 00:20:23.400] Is the mission enough to stay that focused for that long?
[00:20:23.400 --> 00:20:28.760] It's a combination of the mission and the drive to grow.
[00:20:28.760 --> 00:20:34.680] So, the mission is helping fellow makers to make a living out of their passion.
[00:20:34.680 --> 00:20:39.160] This is our mission, which turns what we're doing as a passion as well, right?
[00:20:39.160 --> 00:20:40.840] So, it's kind of meta.
[00:20:40.840 --> 00:20:42.680] And it came for a reason, right?
[00:20:42.680 --> 00:20:46.200] So, it took me many years until I realized that I have to do it.
[00:20:46.200 --> 00:20:51.480] So, we've been stuck in this nine to 12 team members for about three years.
[00:20:51.480 --> 00:21:00.680] And it was this limbo that, you know, we hire someone, hire another, fire, and we constantly, a little more, a little less, a little more, a little less.
[00:21:00.680 --> 00:21:04.680] And I realized that I can't keep, like, I have to bring senior people.
[00:21:04.680 --> 00:21:12.040] I can't keep growing it myself because you can't hire great people when you don't have the time to invest in that.
[00:21:12.200 --> 00:21:13.560] Simple as that.
[00:21:13.560 --> 00:21:24.320] So, I realized that if I want to grow beyond that 12 team members, and I felt that we had to because we're growing a lot customer-wise, so we have to keep supporting them.
[00:21:24.320 --> 00:21:27.760] Like, I have to invest in building a leadership team.
[00:21:27.760 --> 00:21:29.200] So, this is what I've done.
[00:21:29.200 --> 00:21:34.560] You know, I had that mission to build that kind of leadership team in that phase.
[00:21:34.560 --> 00:21:38.800] And this is what I started to do basically, as long as it takes.
[00:21:38.800 --> 00:21:46.160] Because, however I looked at it, if I wanted to be on the next phase, like after that, I had to go through that stage.
[00:21:46.160 --> 00:21:48.320] So, there was no way out of it.
[00:21:48.320 --> 00:21:49.360] I just had to do it.
[00:21:49.360 --> 00:21:50.560] This is how I looked at it.
[00:21:50.560 --> 00:21:51.200] That makes sense.
[00:21:51.200 --> 00:21:55.280] Like, if you have a forcing function like this, that keeps you motivated.
[00:21:55.280 --> 00:21:58.800] I mean, I didn't want to sell, you know, so that was not an option for me.
[00:21:58.800 --> 00:22:02.880] And there's no point to close because it's working and it's growing.
[00:22:02.880 --> 00:22:08.080] So, I either grow with that or I drown with everything that's happening.
[00:22:08.080 --> 00:22:15.520] It literally drowning because there's like too much operations and all the things that are happening that we have to scale the team.
[00:22:15.520 --> 00:22:16.480] Why not sell?
[00:22:16.480 --> 00:22:18.160] Because I'm passionate about that.
[00:22:18.160 --> 00:22:19.680] You know, I'm enjoying that.
[00:22:19.680 --> 00:22:21.680] Let's say I'm selling it, right?
[00:22:21.680 --> 00:22:22.960] What's the outcome?
[00:22:22.960 --> 00:22:25.360] I mean, there's financial thingy.
[00:22:25.360 --> 00:22:28.480] I will just add that I already exited a company before.
[00:22:28.480 --> 00:22:31.360] So, I do have that cushion, right?
[00:22:31.360 --> 00:22:35.040] So, I don't feel that in stress from a financial perspective.
[00:22:35.040 --> 00:22:36.480] And this is definitely important.
[00:22:36.480 --> 00:22:43.120] So, I would say that before you make that first life-changing exit, if you have an opportunity to sell, right?
[00:22:43.120 --> 00:22:44.960] You should definitely consider that.
[00:22:44.960 --> 00:22:46.720] But I didn't have that pressure.
[00:22:46.720 --> 00:22:49.280] I was doing something that I'm really excited about.
[00:22:49.280 --> 00:22:51.000] It's growing very fast.
[00:22:51.000 --> 00:22:51.240] Right.
[00:22:51.280 --> 00:22:56.160] So, what's the point to just give it to someone else and then start again from the beginning?
[00:22:56.160 --> 00:22:56.520] Yeah.
[00:22:56.840 --> 00:22:57.240] Right.
[00:22:57.280 --> 00:22:58.480] That's the founder problem.
[00:22:58.640 --> 00:22:59.760] You got to do something.
[00:22:59.760 --> 00:23:00.280] Yeah.
[00:23:00.280 --> 00:23:02.440] And probably something that you're passionate about.
[00:22:59.840 --> 00:23:04.520] So you might build the same thing again.
[00:23:04.760 --> 00:23:13.000] I hear so many stories of founders who just wait out the period that they're not allowed to build the product again and then build it again.
[00:23:13.560 --> 00:23:19.160] So funny, like the non-compete expires and they're right at it again, which is kind of you're right.
[00:23:19.240 --> 00:23:22.440] Pointless if the passion is in the product itself.
[00:23:22.440 --> 00:23:23.000] Yeah.
[00:23:23.000 --> 00:23:26.280] And I had so much more to build and to do.
[00:23:26.280 --> 00:23:28.520] And like, you know, the vision was there.
[00:23:28.520 --> 00:23:31.720] It's big and it's still like gigantic for me.
[00:23:31.720 --> 00:23:38.120] Did this vision ever change like along just the development of the industry that you were serving over time?
[00:23:38.120 --> 00:23:45.160] Because 10 years ago, building a merchant of record, building a payment platform probably looked slightly different than it does today.
[00:23:45.160 --> 00:23:47.240] Well, maybe I didn't use the terminology.
[00:23:47.240 --> 00:23:48.760] It wasn't as common.
[00:23:48.760 --> 00:23:53.240] But the whole merchant of record, it was unplanned thingy.
[00:23:53.240 --> 00:23:53.720] Okay.
[00:23:53.720 --> 00:24:01.000] It was for me, I need to solve a problem of taking a product and moving it to a selling solution, right?
[00:24:01.000 --> 00:24:02.920] Something that you can sell globally.
[00:24:02.920 --> 00:24:05.160] That was the problem I'm trying to solve.
[00:24:05.160 --> 00:24:15.080] And then I looked on an ecosystem and I see that Stripe and PayPal, they are only available in a limited amount of countries, but the world is much bigger.
[00:24:15.080 --> 00:24:21.480] And I do want those people all over the world to use Freemas to solve their pain and solve their problem.
[00:24:21.480 --> 00:24:22.840] So how do I do that?
[00:24:22.840 --> 00:24:27.480] Okay, we need to tackle it, we need to take the payments and use our payment gateways.
[00:24:27.480 --> 00:24:28.760] So that was the reason.
[00:24:28.760 --> 00:24:31.880] It wasn't about I want to solve sales taxes.
[00:24:31.880 --> 00:24:33.720] No, it's a pain in the ass.
[00:24:33.720 --> 00:24:35.480] I don't want to deal with that, right?
[00:24:36.120 --> 00:24:48.640] But indirectly, you get into those problems, you solve them as your personal pain, but it's amazing that it, you know, relieves all the other that are using Freemis that they don't need to deal with that.
[00:24:44.840 --> 00:24:51.680] But it wasn't about, oh, let's do a merchant of record.
[00:24:52.320 --> 00:24:55.120] Has it become easier to do payments globally?
[00:24:55.120 --> 00:25:01.600] Because in my, let's call it naive mind, the internet economy just gets better and better at building technical solutions.
[00:25:01.600 --> 00:25:15.200] But then I remember when we ran Feedback Panda, the business that I sold and exited a couple of years ago, at some point, India had a banking regulation overhaul that made it almost impossible to get like recurring subscriptions going.
[00:25:15.200 --> 00:25:18.000] So things got harder instead of easier.
[00:25:18.000 --> 00:25:22.880] Like, how does that work for you as somebody who has to take money from like hundreds of countries at this point?
[00:25:22.880 --> 00:25:24.640] There is always something.
[00:25:24.640 --> 00:25:25.360] Always.
[00:25:25.520 --> 00:25:26.000] Yeah.
[00:25:26.640 --> 00:25:27.920] It's never ending.
[00:25:27.920 --> 00:25:30.800] There are regulations coming all the time.
[00:25:30.800 --> 00:25:33.520] Now the next one, the European Union love regulations.
[00:25:33.760 --> 00:25:34.160] They love that.
[00:25:34.480 --> 00:25:36.800] They're constantly coming with you things.
[00:25:36.800 --> 00:25:49.360] GDPR, EU VAT, you know, like they are the ones that kind of pioneered the whole concept of, you know, let's charge people, even if they're late-charge companies, you know, VAT, even though they're not local.
[00:25:49.360 --> 00:25:52.800] And everyone said, oh, you know, they can I curse in this show.
[00:25:52.800 --> 00:25:53.440] I don't know.
[00:25:53.760 --> 00:25:54.400] Yeah, sure.
[00:25:54.720 --> 00:25:57.360] When it comes to VAT, please do.
[00:25:57.360 --> 00:25:57.840] Yeah.
[00:25:57.840 --> 00:25:58.480] Yeah, yeah.
[00:25:58.480 --> 00:26:01.920] So everyone said, oh, fuck, there's an opportunity to make more money.
[00:26:01.920 --> 00:26:04.960] So all the countries started to kind of follow that pattern.
[00:26:04.960 --> 00:26:07.600] But there's the Accessibility Act coming.
[00:26:07.600 --> 00:26:15.280] I mean, the origins of what they're doing make sense and some of the things, but it just keeps adding complexities all the time.
[00:26:15.280 --> 00:26:27.120] And when you have to sell globally and comply with all those regulations, I think that one of the biggest underestimated things are maintenance.
[00:26:27.120 --> 00:26:34.040] Okay, you start, you know, collecting, remitting, dealing with taxes or some regulation in one place, but it's not done.
[00:26:34.360 --> 00:26:38.360] You have to constantly keep watching, monitoring what's happening.
[00:26:38.600 --> 00:26:42.120] like taxability classification changing.
[00:26:42.120 --> 00:26:49.080] One place is charging SaaS today, tomorrow they change the rule or the tax rate is going down or whatever.
[00:26:49.080 --> 00:26:54.360] So you have to like monitor all these signals and yeah, it's never ending.
[00:26:54.360 --> 00:26:58.120] For a company of 20, that sounds like a lot of work.
[00:26:58.120 --> 00:27:04.760] Like I would assume that, you know, if you mentioned Stripe and similar big players in the field, they have thousands of employees.
[00:27:04.760 --> 00:27:08.520] Half of them probably are just lawyers trying to figure all of this out, right?
[00:27:08.520 --> 00:27:10.600] So even they struggle with that.
[00:27:10.600 --> 00:27:18.760] Like for a much smaller business that is more focused in terms of who they serve and therefore can handle this, it still must be a lot of work, right?
[00:27:18.760 --> 00:27:20.040] For a team of 20.
[00:27:20.280 --> 00:27:24.440] Does that ever make you want to build out a much bigger company?
[00:27:24.440 --> 00:27:25.800] How do you approach this?
[00:27:25.800 --> 00:27:31.640] Yeah, I want to stay as small as possible as a team, but we do need to grow and we are hiring, right?
[00:27:31.640 --> 00:27:34.760] But I don't want to go crazy, not right now.
[00:27:34.760 --> 00:27:37.000] I don't think it's needed in our case.
[00:27:37.000 --> 00:27:42.360] Maybe in the future, just in a way that, you know, the bigger the organization, things are just slower.
[00:27:42.360 --> 00:27:43.800] That's the way it works.
[00:27:43.800 --> 00:27:47.400] You have more smarter people and you want to hear their advice.
[00:27:47.400 --> 00:27:49.960] So it's just taking longer.
[00:27:50.280 --> 00:27:51.800] You need to brainstorm.
[00:27:51.800 --> 00:27:55.240] You know, in the beginning, it's just, let's say, me and a designer, right?
[00:27:55.240 --> 00:27:57.960] We just, okay, on the fly, we take decisions.
[00:27:57.960 --> 00:28:01.400] But now you have, oh, we have a head of brand, so you want to hear the brand.
[00:28:01.640 --> 00:28:04.440] We have the CMO, so you want to hear there, the head of content.
[00:28:04.920 --> 00:28:09.080] It will be kind of a shame if you don't use them because they're smart people.
[00:28:09.080 --> 00:28:11.560] But it just makes everything much slower.
[00:28:11.560 --> 00:28:16.800] So, yes, we could use more people, and this is why we're hiring.
[00:28:17.120 --> 00:28:28.000] I would say that also, unlike mega corporate, like we can move faster, and also we don't like we are okay with some risks.
[00:28:28.000 --> 00:28:43.360] We have some exposures that we're just living with, you know, and it's okay when we get to a bigger size or the exposure is bigger enough, like we can deal with worst case, we will take the penalty, you know, of whatever it is.
[00:28:43.360 --> 00:28:46.080] So, we're risk takers as a smaller team.
[00:28:46.080 --> 00:28:49.120] That resonates with me because that's just what founders do, right?
[00:28:49.120 --> 00:28:55.760] Like, if you serve founders, you might just as well be one, you know, and be a little on the entrepreneurial risk-take side.
[00:28:55.760 --> 00:28:56.960] Makes perfect sense to me.
[00:28:56.960 --> 00:29:01.280] And I think it also impacts how you decide what to do with the business and what you don't do.
[00:29:01.280 --> 00:29:06.400] It feels like you could do everything and even further expose yourself to risks.
[00:29:06.400 --> 00:29:14.320] But when I look at the product and I look at how you present and position yourself, it is very clear that you're hyper-focused on a specific kind of the market.
[00:29:14.320 --> 00:29:17.680] And the features that you offer are also focused on this.
[00:29:17.680 --> 00:29:22.160] You're not trying to be the solution for everybody everywhere at all times, right?
[00:29:22.160 --> 00:29:26.240] You're very, very specific in how you approach selling product over the internet.
[00:29:26.240 --> 00:29:38.400] So, I wonder: did you ever consciously choose to not build something that somebody else may have, but you found like this is something that we don't want to look into, that we don't need to extend resources into?
[00:29:38.400 --> 00:29:39.680] Yeah, yeah, absolutely.
[00:29:39.680 --> 00:29:42.880] We have, we're limited, you know, we can't just build everything.
[00:29:42.880 --> 00:29:50.320] A very common and complementary request that coming is, why can't we sell services?
[00:29:50.320 --> 00:29:50.720] Right?
[00:29:50.720 --> 00:29:54.560] I'm building a product, but I'm doing some customization work for a client.
[00:29:54.560 --> 00:29:57.520] So, why can't we also sell services on top of that?
[00:29:57.520 --> 00:29:59.520] They already, like, we already have the checkout there.
[00:29:59.520 --> 00:30:10.440] It's just about let's add another product and plan, but it adds additional exposure and complexities and legal stuff and taxes that we just don't want to get into.
[00:30:10.600 --> 00:30:13.000] This is not our bread and butter.
[00:30:13.000 --> 00:30:35.800] I do feel that maybe in the future, once we accomplish all the big things that we want to do with selling software, maybe we can do some expansion to services, but you can't be us plus offer an upwork, leaving the marketplace aside, but all the entire process of hiring like service providers in parallel with 20 team members.
[00:30:35.800 --> 00:30:37.480] It's just not feasible.
[00:30:37.480 --> 00:30:42.840] Yeah, and I think that makes you different in a very good way because you're not even trying to chase that.
[00:30:42.840 --> 00:30:53.560] Like, you know what you can do, you know what you can do well, and you know where, if you were to put like resources into this, it would kind of be a waste of your time, at least now, right?
[00:30:53.560 --> 00:30:56.360] At least for the existing team, the existing business.
[00:30:56.360 --> 00:31:01.240] How else are you different from like the existing payment providers in the field?
[00:31:01.240 --> 00:31:11.800] So, the same way that we didn't start with we want to be an MOR, the vision was we want to solve the whole commercial aspects of selling software globally, not locally.
[00:31:11.800 --> 00:31:15.240] Locally, it's easier, it's a different set of problems.
[00:31:15.560 --> 00:31:33.160] And one thing that we notice is that software makers are really good at coding, you know, they can put the checkout, the billing maybe, but they're not good in many other aspects like marketing and pricing and packaging and all this stuff.
[00:31:33.120 --> 00:31:40.600] Like, like they need some guidance, or preferably, those things should come built in as part of the solution.
[00:31:40.600 --> 00:31:53.920] So, the way we look on the problem is we're not only solving like the payment or the billing side of things, we're looking on the entire customer life cycle from before they buy until they cancel and after.
[00:31:54.240 --> 00:32:00.000] So, someone starts a checkout and they abandon before even entering your email.
[00:32:00.000 --> 00:32:02.880] With Freemuse, you can show an exit intent pop-up.
[00:32:02.880 --> 00:32:06.240] When someone does enter their email, there is a card recovery.
[00:32:06.240 --> 00:32:09.680] So, this is like pre-purchase kind of interactions.
[00:32:09.680 --> 00:32:25.840] So, I would say there is a lot of touch points in the life cycle of a customer that through those micro interactions, you can reduce churn, increase customer lifetime value, recover people to get back into subscription.
[00:32:25.840 --> 00:32:29.360] So, when they go to cancellation, we have some retention flow.
[00:32:29.360 --> 00:32:39.280] Even if they cancel, when they get to license ending to the like the period of their subscription, we kind of re-encourage them, try to recover that subscription.
[00:32:39.280 --> 00:32:46.560] So, there's a lot of those micro interactions through emails, through the checkout, through the customer portal.
[00:32:46.560 --> 00:32:50.080] And with Freemuse, we tackle it automatically out of the box.
[00:32:50.080 --> 00:32:52.000] So, you don't need to think about stuff.
[00:32:52.000 --> 00:32:54.400] And we keep adding those as we go.
[00:32:54.400 --> 00:33:00.560] So, a big part of the solution is focused on conversion rate optimization and marketing automation built in.
[00:33:00.560 --> 00:33:06.560] So, you don't need to plug, convert kit, and start thinking: oh, how do I phrase that email?
[00:33:06.560 --> 00:33:07.280] What is the email?
[00:33:07.360 --> 00:33:10.240] In what event do I need to trigger that email?
[00:33:10.240 --> 00:33:13.520] So, this is all coming out of the box.
[00:33:13.520 --> 00:33:18.240] And the alignment in interest is there because it's a revenue share model.
[00:33:18.240 --> 00:33:24.400] So, the more we can maximize your financial potential, we are benefiting from that directly.
[00:33:24.400 --> 00:33:27.520] So, this is like one pillar, how we are different.
[00:33:27.520 --> 00:33:33.320] The second, like I said, people don't necessarily know how to price, package, or to do marketing, etc.
[00:33:29.840 --> 00:33:36.360] So, we take a very proactive approach.
[00:33:36.600 --> 00:33:43.720] We do a lot of educational guidance through our different channels: video, blog, podcasting, etc.
[00:33:43.880 --> 00:33:49.080] But we are also happy to open a call with founders and discuss this stuff.
[00:33:49.080 --> 00:33:51.400] So, like, how do you package your product?
[00:33:51.400 --> 00:34:04.600] And I actually was very, very excited when I went to MicroConf and I met Rob because, like, what he's doing through TinySeed is like, I felt so much kind of the same stuff that I'm doing with founders, right?
[00:34:04.680 --> 00:34:06.040] Through Freemis.
[00:34:06.040 --> 00:34:14.520] And we have that interest as well, because if they can, you know, make more money through packaging, then we are benefiting from that.
[00:34:14.520 --> 00:34:20.760] And the last one, give me the third one: is the whole network thing.
[00:34:20.760 --> 00:34:23.400] So, just as MicroCon, right?
[00:34:23.400 --> 00:34:28.040] It is critical in order to succeed in business to have a network.
[00:34:28.040 --> 00:34:30.200] So, network is a big thing for us.
[00:34:30.200 --> 00:34:38.920] The third pillar, so we're building that community through a Slack, through physical events that we're doing together.
[00:34:38.920 --> 00:34:49.960] So, we constantly try to create opportunities for makers on our platform to partner with each other, learn from each other in terms of exit opportunities.
[00:34:49.960 --> 00:34:56.280] Because we're connected with many makers, naturally, buyers of businesses want to be connected with us.
[00:34:56.280 --> 00:35:04.520] So, when you want to sell your business, people naturally come to us, to me, saying, Hey, like, do you know someone that could be interested?
[00:35:04.520 --> 00:35:06.520] So, we're also making that connection.
[00:35:06.520 --> 00:35:18.640] So, I mentioned at the beginning, looking on the entire life cycle of the customer, we're also looking on the entire life cycle of your software business from the launch scale to exit.
[00:35:18.640 --> 00:35:23.440] Because in our ecosystem, in Bootstrap world, you don't do IPOs, right?
[00:35:23.440 --> 00:35:26.560] You're most likely going to die or sell.
[00:35:26.560 --> 00:35:31.440] So, hopefully, you get to the sell side of things, and we're there to help you also to sell it.
[00:35:31.440 --> 00:35:34.400] Man, there is so much in these three answers.
[00:35:34.400 --> 00:35:38.400] I think there are three really major lessons that I just want to highlight here again.
[00:35:38.400 --> 00:35:40.400] Because thank you for sharing this.
[00:35:40.400 --> 00:35:46.400] First one, like I was talking about how you don't do this kind of horizontal integration, like going of the services or tests or that.
[00:35:46.400 --> 00:35:48.160] You're doing a full vertical integration.
[00:35:48.160 --> 00:35:52.240] That is amazing because that kind of leads to the second one: the alignment.
[00:35:52.240 --> 00:35:59.520] Like, you understand perfectly what a founder needs, what a software entrepreneur is good at, and may not be good at.
[00:35:59.520 --> 00:36:08.560] So, by taking all this and solving it for them in one like fully verticalized package, you get the alignment because you understand, right?
[00:36:08.560 --> 00:36:18.720] Like, if you were somebody who was just trying to serve that market, but you didn't get the personal perspective, you wouldn't do these things because you would say, ah, they can do this themselves, but you know that they don't like it.
[00:36:18.720 --> 00:36:22.960] You know that they may not even be capable of coming up with the idea of doing it in the first place.
[00:36:22.960 --> 00:36:25.200] So, you take that and solve it for them.
[00:36:25.200 --> 00:36:32.800] And then you build a community of people, like not just on the business level, but on the founder quality of life level.
[00:36:32.800 --> 00:36:33.760] That is really cool.
[00:36:33.760 --> 00:36:36.160] Like, that is a very special kind of customer service.
[00:36:36.160 --> 00:36:41.920] If you don't just want to help them solve their problem, but you actually want to allow them to have a life-changing exit.
[00:36:41.920 --> 00:36:45.520] And we also have an affiliate platform as part of Fremius.
[00:36:45.520 --> 00:36:50.960] So, we naturally, over the years, built connections with affiliates.
[00:36:50.960 --> 00:36:54.560] So, we are also happy to facilitate connections to affiliates.
[00:36:54.560 --> 00:37:00.000] So, if there's some YouTuber that in our network and you have like an exciting product, we can make that connection.
[00:37:00.360 --> 00:37:12.440] And we're doing this event called Makers Meetup, where previously it was focused on bringing just like software makers, but now we start to bring influencers as well because it's like mutually beneficial, right?
[00:37:12.760 --> 00:37:14.920] They are looking for products to promote.
[00:37:14.920 --> 00:37:17.000] Founders are looking for them.
[00:37:17.000 --> 00:37:22.200] So we started to kind of grow that program as well, basically creating opportunities.
[00:37:22.520 --> 00:37:31.240] Once you really focus on a specific vertical, and the entire kind of life cycle of that vertical, opportunities come in.
[00:37:31.240 --> 00:37:36.280] We have like PERCS network, people who want to offer their services for that audience.
[00:37:36.280 --> 00:37:39.880] So they're willing to, you know, offer exclusive discounts.
[00:37:39.880 --> 00:37:42.040] So we have that in the dashboard as well.
[00:37:42.040 --> 00:37:48.680] And we try to focus on solutions that are really relevant to our audience and not just, you know, anything out there.
[00:37:48.680 --> 00:37:52.920] So you get a lot, a lot of value, and we keep adding more of that.
[00:37:52.920 --> 00:37:57.640] And I can also say that, like you said, that we know how to help them.
[00:37:57.640 --> 00:38:00.440] Yes, because we've been through the journey, right?
[00:38:00.440 --> 00:38:16.440] And this is why we're all, it feels that like our audience is pushing us to grow as well, because we're acquiring all this knowledge, experience, and data, right, that we can pass over to help them be more successful in their business.
[00:38:16.440 --> 00:38:21.960] Yeah, you're definitely facilitating growth and growing yourself as a consequence of that.
[00:38:21.960 --> 00:38:22.920] That is amazing.
[00:38:22.920 --> 00:38:27.560] And one thing that really stands out is how you do not shy away from connecting.
[00:38:27.560 --> 00:38:29.720] Like that's something, and you said it, introvert, right?
[00:38:29.720 --> 00:38:31.080] Introverts tend to stay at home.
[00:38:31.080 --> 00:38:46.160] You know, we sit on the couch, we read our books, we do our computer stuff, but to be out there and connecting people, like both in terms of connecting your customers with their customers and then connecting your customers with other people like them, and then connecting them with a potential acquirer and so on.
[00:38:46.480 --> 00:38:58.080] That is an intentional effort that I'm really, really happy you're doing because this is what a founder really is: a connector, like a facilitator, somebody who becomes part of a community or fosters community in the first place.
[00:38:58.080 --> 00:38:59.360] So that is amazing.
[00:38:59.360 --> 00:39:10.480] And it brings me to, let's call it my last question: if people want to connect with you and learn more about the business and learn more about the events that you are at or that you are facilitating, where do you think they should go?
[00:39:10.480 --> 00:39:13.760] Where should they check on Freemuse News and news of Vova?
[00:39:13.760 --> 00:39:16.880] Yeah, so we're pretty active on all social networks.
[00:39:16.880 --> 00:39:21.920] I would say mostly on X and LinkedIn, also experimenting with Blue Sky.
[00:39:21.920 --> 00:39:27.920] So for me personally, Vova Feldman, I guess it will be written somewhere in the notes.
[00:39:27.920 --> 00:39:32.240] So you can find how to spell that or Freemuse.
[00:39:32.240 --> 00:39:34.320] We're also very active on YouTube.
[00:39:34.320 --> 00:39:37.680] So we constantly push content out there on the blog.
[00:39:37.680 --> 00:39:47.440] We have a podcast called plugin.fm, which brings basically founders that have some unique experience.
[00:39:47.440 --> 00:39:55.840] And we focus on that first-hand experience and trying to kind of distill actionable, you know, things that you can take out of every episode.
[00:39:55.840 --> 00:40:06.400] We had people like Jason Cohen, Matt Bollenweg, Arvid, of course, talking about the whole building public ecosystem.
[00:40:06.400 --> 00:40:08.400] Amazing episode, by the way.
[00:40:08.400 --> 00:40:10.160] Also, feel free to email me.
[00:40:10.160 --> 00:40:11.360] Honestly, I'm available.
[00:40:11.360 --> 00:40:14.080] So it's Vova at Freemuse.com.
[00:40:14.080 --> 00:40:16.480] You are available and you're present in the community.
[00:40:16.480 --> 00:40:17.840] I really appreciate that.
[00:40:17.840 --> 00:40:21.760] And thank you for sharing all these insights into Freemius and your journey today.
[00:40:21.760 --> 00:40:24.640] I think that is, I'm still very inspired by this.
[00:40:24.640 --> 00:40:30.120] I was glad to meet you at the conference and I'm super happy that you got to share 10 years, man.
[00:40:30.120 --> 00:40:34.440] That is a lot of time and a lot of time building something really, really cool.
[00:40:34.440 --> 00:40:35.000] Appreciate it.
[00:40:29.840 --> 00:40:36.280] Thank you so much for coming on the show.
[00:40:36.600 --> 00:40:37.480] Thanks for having me.
[00:40:37.480 --> 00:40:38.520] It was really awesome.
[00:40:38.520 --> 00:40:39.480] Appreciate that.
[00:40:39.480 --> 00:40:40.680] And that's it for today.
[00:40:40.680 --> 00:40:42.920] Thank you so much for listening to the Bootstrap Founder.
[00:40:42.920 --> 00:40:46.440] You can find me on Twitter at Avitkal, A-R-V-I-D, K-A-H-L.
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