The Bootstrapped Founder

Arvid Kahl
Hello everyone and welcome to The Bootstrapped Founder. Today, I'm talking to Daniel Fayle, co-founder of Chekkit, a business that he and his team have bootstrapped to $2 million in ARR. We'll touch on finding the right vertical to get started, how to do things that don't scale, and what choices need to be made to get a business to seven figures. Here's Dan. I first really got into contact with you on Twitter, like we had this little conversation about your business, which is at this point at what like 1.7 million in annual recurring revenue. Is that right? Is that where it is?

Daniel Fayle
Yeah, yeah, we're doing a little bit more than that now.

Arvid Kahl
Oh, wow!

Daniel Fayle
So we've grown rapidly over the last six months.

Arvid Kahl
Man, you should update your your Twitter, the pinned post or whatever because that still says 1.7. That's the thing. If you go really well, you don't even have the time to keep up with the public, you know, the communication of how well you've grown, right?

Daniel Fayle
Yeah, every month is changing. So I'll have to keep up with that.

Arvid Kahl
Well, I guess that's really good for you because a business that is already add, you know, one point some two point whatever million dollars in annual recurring revenue. Now, that's a great business to begin with, the fact that it's bootstrapped. Now, that just blew my mind. And that's why I wanted to talk to you today because I feel any business that gets into this kind of territory, you must be doing something right. And when people do something right. I wanna learn what that is. I wanna learn what the kind of decisions behind that were, you know, how it came to happen. And when this conversation that we had, you told me that you're in a hyper competitive field full of venture capital funded businesses. And I think you just chose hardmode with this, like, how did you choose that particular market with that super funded kind of competition? Was that a conscious choice? Or did you just fall into this project?

Daniel Fayle
Yeah, I wouldn't say it was a conscious choice. I mean, we started out to give you some background, we started out with a text messaging wifi marketing product. And then just general marketing services. So we worked with, we started out working just with Winnipeg clients, so just in restaurants, so hospitality restaurants, and so and then just restaurant chains, and essentially, the product was you'd walk into a restaurant. You'd throw in your details when you logged into wifi, that would give the business the ability to collect those details. It was the mobile number, email, but a lot of it was just done over SMS. And then the business could kind of retarget those people, send out text messages for things like promotions and stuff like that for like the holiday season or just in general events to kind of drive that new traffic and business through there. So that was the initial product, just like you log into wifi. They could text back and forth. So kind of like a mass texting or just an individual personal text message product. So that's kind of how we and then from there, we got we worked really closely with like our first few customers and we're just like asked them, hey, what do you guys need? What do guys look at on the digital side? And a lot of them came back and kind of said, you know, is there a way that you can aggregate these all these different reviews constantly having to respond to Google reviews, the TripAdvisor reviews, of Facebook recommendations reviews. And at the time, we kind of were so focused on just the wifi marketing and just the promotional side of that product. We kind of thought it was silly, we're like, why would we aggregate all these reviews? Like we're not, that's not really what we're looking to do. But we got the same feedback. You know, basically, time and time again, right? So it was just constant like, hey, is there something we could do with these reviews? So we actually, we went back and looked at it, we said, well, why don't we build out on our dashboard? Our dashboard was super simple back then. Why don't we build out a new tab where you have all those different reviews in one place where they can at least respond? So that was kind of the reactive approach that we took in the sense that we got some feedback. We added it to our dashboard and our product at the time. And then we went a step further. And we're like, well, you know, if these businesses find these reviews super important, what about you know, actually proactively helping them get reviews, right? So restaurants, if you go in, you have an experience, you leave a review. They're not asking a lot of the happy customers that go in and go out and don't really think about leaving reviews. We built out a product because we already had that side of things, the outbound text product. But why don't we have the ability to send out a link and have them the option between Google or Facebook or TripAdvisor or any other platform so. And that's when we kind of fell into I wouldn't say a different market, but we were always in the text messaging side, but just the review management piece. So we got into the new management kind of fully and we branched out from Winnipeg and just restaurants here to, we actually kind of like weirdly just went into like dental because we thought like dentists are always talking about that. So, and I had a friend that had a dental clinic. And so we he was always talking about so we got to kind of get on with a bunch of different dental clinics. And for whatever reason, we just stay focused on dental for a long time. And then we branched out to other verticals. So I don't think to go back to your question, I don't think we really like chose that market. We kind of were in the text messaging side, got into the review management, and then we built out a slew of other products for a ton of different verticals. So,

Arvid Kahl
So much to unpack here, that is just the collection of all these little choices, like starting in one location as a, essentially, like high touch, getting people to use your little product locally, like going into their restaurants, I assume, to kind of get them to use it to then going into a completely different niche because you knew somebody, which is always great.

Daniel Fayle
Yeah

Arvid Kahl
Like understanding, having somebody who understands the actual problems for you to, you know, relate to and to take your knowledge from one kind of industry and kind of transplant it onto another. That is very interesting choice there. Then just falling into this whole review thing. Wow, what a journey. And particularly the part I wanna kinda, I wanna talk about the part where you started, because that feels to me like it was a very work intense kind of action. How many people were there? Was it just you and your co-founder, Myles at this point?

Daniel Fayle
There was four of us. So there's the four founders. Lee, Emily, they're on the technical side and then me and Myles on the business side.

Arvid Kahl
Yeah, okay. Well, good to know, because I don't it didn't really find much about your other two co-founders, obviously, like, if you have you know, if you have technical people, they kind of like stay in the shadows, which is perfectly fine. But it sounds like that was a lot of hands on kind of work. Did you actually go to all these restaurants and kinda try to sell it? Was it like a high touch sales process?

Daniel Fayle
Yeah, you know what? This is, people don't believe me every time I like tell this or share this. But essentially, when we started, you know, branching out and kind of the very start building our company. We didn't know anything about digital marketing. So we didn't know anything about Google ads or Facebook ads or SEO or telemarketing or any of those channels that, you know, all of these companies use and build out and that are highly successful. And to be honest, we had no money, we had absolutely no money. So the easiest thing was to, we were doing just started ourselves. So we just get in our cars. At the time, we didn't have money for brochures or even business cards. So we'd go in there and kind of just pitch the product with our laptops and essentially show them the product that we had and how it worked. And so we just go around to restaurants. And so that's how we got our first few clients. And you know, you're talking about how we kind of switched into dental. It's tough to get your first few clients, of course, so we naturally kind of were branching out to who we knew. And so we knew someone in the dental side. So that's kind of where we branched out there. But for sure, like, yeah on the side, so it was door to door sales. And then for a while we actually picked up and moved to Calgary. Because we just thought the business would sell for three months. We were doing door to door sales in Calgary, and it was all dental clinics and some restaurants and stuff. And then picked up our first probably like 100 customers say we came back to Winnipeg. And then that's when we started thinking about branching out to other verticals, not just dental and restaurants, but like auto collision, jewelry stores, any retail. So there's furniture stores. Now there's a ton of different verticals that we work in. But yeah, there's this the start of it was door to door sales. So which is pretty odd.

Arvid Kahl
Interesting to see you go to yet another city, and then try to save the bear. That the local approach, obviously, like if you don't have either the funds or the skill of like doing all this digital outreach, we don't even know it exists. You know, if you don't have

Daniel Fayle
Yeah

Arvid Kahl
That kind of in your back pocket, you can, that's all you can do. All you can do is kind of canvass the local neighborhoods and try to find the restaurants or the places that you could sell your product to.

Daniel Fayle
Yeah

Arvid Kahl
That's super interesting. Whether any verticals that you tried that didn't work at all that were not receptive to this kind of product?

Daniel Fayle
You know what? I don't think we really pinned anything is it didn't work like even now I really think we work with so many different types of local businesses. I really think we could we can work with everybody really. So there wasn't any verticals that we thought didn't work. I think we just stuck to one, you know, mostly dental at the time because and restaurants because we felt comfortable and we just kind of knew that. So walking into a dental clinic, we kind of knew what we're gonna getting into. The gatekeepers at the front kind of like shoo, get out of here. And the restaurants were a little bit different. But no, I don't think there's any verticals that we were like, it's not gonna work, I guess. Or we didn't really pin on it at the time. So

Arvid Kahl
Yeah, that makes sense. Like if obviously, it's one of the best choices you can make is to go with what you know, and particularly if you have done or developing this level of insight and knowledge into how to convince people more easily and you know, better. You stick with that niche, makes perfect sense to me. Do you still do this today, like now? And how old is the business? Like, two questions, I guess. How old is the business? And are you still going into places trying to get customers? Or have you changed?

Daniel Fayle
Yeah. So no, we don't do any door to door sales. I wouldn't mind doing a couple here and there. But no, it is fun. But no, we don't do that anymore. We branch out with different, a ton of different channels. Now it's all online, really. So on that question, we like we have an affiliate marketing. We just rolled out with that actually, it's doing really well. Email marketing has been really, really well done really, really well for us. We have some people doing some cold calls. So obviously just direct sales, that's also worked out really well. And then we did Google ads and Facebook ads for a bit. It's pretty expensive. So we're not doing a whole lot of that right now. Just because we found kind of the channels that are really working and just doubled down on those. What was the first part of the question, sir?

Arvid Kahl
How old is the business? So how long have you been in business?

Daniel Fayle
So we're rolling up on six years. Five, six years. Yeah.

Arvid Kahl
Wow, that was

Daniel Fayle
I was like 25, but

Arvid Kahl
Having a couple million, which is kind of how I would phrase it in annual revenue after six years. I think that's the dream. You know, like the five, six years getting into a couple million, having a really solid business. That sounds like the software entrepreneur dream, and you're living it, which is awesome. Really happy for you, that's so cool. And the fact that you have a team doing this, that's interesting to me, too. Obviously, you have to grow at some point. When did you choose to hire people to do this for you? When was the time did you decide to do that?

Daniel Fayle
It's pretty natural, like I mean, we just kind of looked at, you know, when there's a ton of leads coming in sales and stuff like that. Like I did, you know, probably the first 500, 600 me and Myles at sales and demos and whatnot. But and then when you kind of like you're scaling things out a little bit more, you start realizing, okay, look, Myles can't be doing all that. I can't be doing all this plus doing demos all day long. And so it was kind of natural, just hiring a sales team. We have some people on the lead gen side and marketing side. We have our devs. We have a group of customer support people now. So it was just natural. We didn't want any like bottlenecks. Like if I'm on different calls or trying to look at, you know, working on the business, it's really tough working in the business as well. Like if you're, if I have six demo calls, it's like, well, that's all I can do for the day, unless I'm working around the clock, which we kind of did for the first year too. But it's anywhere on here, so it's not the best idea to for long term, I guess.

Arvid Kahl
Yeah. Well, you became aware of the fact that burnout probably is not the best to keep running a business, right?

Daniel Fayle
Yeah, yeah.

Arvid Kahl
Did it affect to that point? Or did you find a way to break or to stop before that happened?

Daniel Fayle
I think we've hit some points for sure. And, you know, I wouldn't say like true burnout, where we just you know, but like, there was definitely some days where it's like, holy smokes, there's a lot to do and we can't really get it all done. And so when we started hiring, it was just noticeable right away when we hired, you know. Our first customer support personnel was like, holy smokes, this is unbelievable. Like, we don't have to do any of those customer support calls anymore. And it was just like, it was great. And then we you know, we hired a few more and then it's like, you know, I haven't I don't even know what's going on customer support half the time these days. I feel like so. But I mean, same thing with like sales. It's like you notice when you hire some salespeople, and they're taking on the demos you can look at. And that's when we had the ability just even recently to look at other channels like the Philip marketing. Right now, we're looking big on SEO, what that looks like in building content, kind of like you're the pro at that. So you know what I'm talking about. But essentially just building like a competitive moat for the business that's more long term sustainable. So yeah, it's been good.

Arvid Kahl
The topic of moats is one thing I wanted to talk to you about because if you are in the kind of market that is saturated with highly capitalized competitors, the moat is quite important for somebody who is bootstrapped, right? Who is only using the money that they have and not the money that somebody throws at them. I mean, you would hope your customers throw money at you. But you know, it's not the same as an institutional fund or anything like it. So with a mode, how would you describe the moat that you're building? Like, is there anything specific that is kind of that originates in you being a bootstrap business?

Daniel Fayle
Yeah, that's a good question. Like, you know, bootstrapping, I think fundamentally changes, you know, how you think. It's that mindset, it sharpens decisions, you know. You really have to drive value for your customer. It really forces focus on the things that matter. And really, that's your customers, I think that in itself is a huge competitive advantage. We don't like if we're, so that's number one. Number two is probably like the speed in which we're working. Like we're constantly taking feedback all the time. We're getting asked what features. Can you build this? Whether it's an insurance company, or a jewelry store, and we don't have to go back to obviously, like a big board, make these decisions and take all this time and have all these meetings to do it. It's kind of like, you know, like, here's a feature example, like, hey, we need a feature for downloading a PDF through a system. Yeah, that sounds like a great idea. All these insurance companies are asking. Okay, great, let's build it out. Let's put it on the list and start building that out. How long can that be built out? Oh, it's gonna take like two weeks or whatever. So I think, number one mindset, that's really been, that's a huge, you know, competitive mode in the fact that, again, you're really focused on every customer, care about every customer. That's a really big thing. And, you know, it's a foundational thing for our business, whether we continue to be bootstrapped forever, or we go raise in five years or whatever. So yeah, that's number one. And number two is really the speed at which we're building stuff out is and speed of building features out and building stuff out for our customers, but also speed at which we're partnering with integrations, partnering with associations, making those connections and those deep rooted partnerships. So I think those two things, yeah, are pretty huge. So you know, that culture that we're kind of like building out, and that foundation that we're laying, I think is our biggest competitive advantage.

Arvid Kahl
Yeah, I investigated your product. And I found that you have a lot of integrations, which is something that I always advocate to founders who are building products that could potentially be used or I mean, most SaaS products are used in the workflow of somebody else, right? Between other tools, between other sources, and like targets of data, the data flow in the business. So you have a lot of them, which is awesome. And you also have like as Zapier integration right in the middle, right? From what I found, like this powers a lot of your integrations. When did you choose to look into integrations as a driver of both leads? And you know, additional workflow integration with the people out there? When was that choice made in your business?

Daniel Fayle
Yeah, I think it came pretty natural. Again, it came from customer feedback, like, hey, they just basically asked like that, we get a lot of that feedback, when we do demos and customer support calls and stuff like that. And during our onboarding, they'll say, dey, do you guys integrate with this platform? And so we always make a list. And then, you know, we look at how many customers have asked. And that's how we kind of decide on what integrations we're gonna build next. But we were definitely like, like hyper aware that, you know, people obviously use other platforms, and if they can integrate and kind of talk to each other and help them save time because that's the biggest thing is just helping them save time not have all these different platforms going on. That's when we kind of knew okay, we should look into some of the integrations and making those those partnerships. So

Arvid Kahl
Yeah, I saw on the reviews on your own homepage, that somebody was writing a customer of yours, that they found it particularly easy to jump into your platform, because you had a migration that you offered them, like from the old platform that they were using, that to me is also a form of integration, right? Allowing the customer to take the data and go into your system. Is that something that is significant, like as part of your moat to just be able to take in that data? Was that a conscious choice as well? Or is it just something that you did at some random point?

Daniel Fayle
Yeah, no, that was definitely a decision we made like we wanted to make it as easy as possible for using other another texting platform or another platform that they have customer conversations essentially to migrate over. Because we kinda knew one of the biggest things if they're coming over the jacket. You know, what does that look like in terms of, is all my customer communication with the platform I'm currently using or just in general gonna be kind of lost forever? How's that work? So our ability to take all those customer communications and transfer those into Chekkit, we do it for free, as kind of just, you know, it's a little bit take some stress off the table for the business owner just in general. But we definitely we made that decision because we knew that that's one of the most important things when you're looking at transferring or switching over, or looking at new products for your business is like, what's the transition look like? And we really try to make it as easy as possible. You can hop on a call with our customer success manager or one of the customer success team members, walk through the onboarding and personal resume. They will help you set up every little feature that you need, set you up with the integrations, make sure web chats placed on your site. So we really try to do all the heavy lifting for the customers that are setting up with us. And then we kind of just welcomed them. You know, if you don't wanna set up another call with the team go over some best practices and stuff like that. Yeah, we just tried to make it as easy as possible.

Arvid Kahl
Are there any customers that you're dealing with that are trying to be positive here, like technically illiterate, that have like trouble with technology? How do you deal with that? Because I see text based communication and I think okay, these people probably, they don't have much to do with computers. Like how have you been dealing with that?

Daniel Fayle
Yeah. Yeah. Well, it's good because me and Myles, like co founder, technically illiterate, so we just think how would we think. Just kidding, but not really. I mean, we're not too good on the tech side, but we do work. Yeah, we, I would say there are definitely some people that you know, they don't know how to put like the web chat script on the site, stuff like that. But again, we have people that are really really good at that. And they can you know, if you're running a Wix site or Shopify or whichever, we can help fill that on the site for you and do some of that technical stuff on the back end. But there's definitely some, they're the local business owners so, right? If you're running up a plumbing company or the owner like you don't necessarily even know how these platforms work. You got maybe a marketing manager or you got you know, a small team doing it for you. So yeah, we try to work with them as best as possible but there's definitely quite a few owners and there's nothing wrong with that. They don't have to be the experts. We always just say we're the experts. We'll help you as much as we can and kind of look at us partnering and us working with you as an extension or an arm from your team rather your business.

Arvid Kahl
Yeah, that's pretty good perspective with people who have a lot going on in their businesses to begin with, right? Like you're probably a tool of many that they have to use to figure it all out to get their business going. So it's nice to consider yourself to be part of their business instead of them being like just your customer. I think that is genuinely good advice for any business owner is to consider themselves an extension of the customer that they're serving, which also makes it much easier to understand how your pricing should be working, right? So that the whole talk about the value metric like what is the thing that if it goes up for your customer it should also go up for you in terms of revenue that you generate. Like if you consider yourself an extension of your customer it's fairly easy, right? Like they make more money and this is the thing that I offer them well, then I should also make more money. Let's talk about pricing a little because you as a bootstrap person seem to have an easier time not charging horrendous prices. Am I getting that right? I think that's part of the conversation that we had is that everyone is way overpriced of your competitors. How have you been navigating that?

Daniel Fayle
Yeah, we're probably the you know the most economical or just competitive in terms of pricing probably in the space right now. There's a, yeah there's you know quite a few competitors that their price pretty heavy essentially or their price more than us, I guess to actually put it. But we yeah, we are pricing the way we can with pricing. I don't think is the best because we did it so long ago to kind of right off but we just, it was really just simple. It was very simple conversation like what do we think? Because we wanted to work with you know, like we were in you know dental for so long or at the start. We know that they can afford more and we could charge more but we wanna work with like a local mom and pop like paint store or jewelry store or all these different verticals like we work with like vacuum shops and stuff like that. So we were like you know what? How can we focus on you know, helping just basically any local business brick and mortar with a physical location essentially? What price do we think they can afford? And you know, they're not looking at like holy smokes, it's a ton of money, but also that, you know, they could look at and be like there's a ton of value here. We're not gonna leave. So that kind of played into you know, our churn numbers and stuff like that. So that's why that's been so low. But yeah, we can't offer the price we just thought people could afford. I mean, we use a lot of software products as well too, like we use close for our CRM. And I think they're like nine bucks or something. And they have a slew of features, right? So, and there's a ton of value there. But essentially, yeah, we looked around and looked at kind of what a lot of software's that we love and what they're priced out, and we kind of just had something somewhere. So

Arvid Kahl
Yeah, inspiration, right? To be inspired by the others around you. Generally, a good idea in any market is just to figure out what are people used to, right? What do they, how do they like their prices. Low, probably, but also the kind of pricing that you offer. I found that very interesting about Chekkit, like you have essentially available, publicly available prices and a book a demo link. That is something that you don't see too often. Because most of the time, like businesses trying to target up market enterprise customers. They only have to book a demo and then it kind of funnels them into this whole sales process. But your book a demo is really just convincing people to actually pay the price that's on the public page. That is novel, I feel because it's also kind of a trust enabling gesture. I feel like the putting the price out there.

Daniel Fayle
100%

Arvid Kahl
When did you last update your prices? Did you ever update your prices?

Daniel Fayle
Oh, honestly, we've never really updated our prices. We always had the 199 package. And then the 99 like we've never really touched it. We've had some add ons like we have add ons now with because of Trello, just just some of the like the textbook landline and stuff like that, but we've never really updated our prices. So

Arvid Kahl
Do you ever intend to?

Daniel Fayle
Well, as of right now, no, no. I don't think so. I mean, that's what that's the one thing that people and again, that's kind of like bleeds back to you know, the competitive mode. I mean, a lot of people say this price is unbelievable. And that's why people have stuck with us so long. So

Arvid Kahl
No, that's interesting. That is a super interesting point that your price consistency also creates like brand loyalty, or like word of mouth about the brand.that is Now something I did not expect because I honestly like not coming from a SaaS background. I know like I put a price there. And I don't do much experimentation. And it just works for a couple years. I kind of forget about it, right? Because money is coming in. And you know, you don't wanna like over saturate people with new prices and upgrades and that kind of stuff. But doing this intentionally or at least like harvesting the effect of it, that people like the brand because it doesn't play with the price all the time because it doesn't charge more just because they can. That is an interesting moat. And that is kind of why I asked because I feel this is what a bootstrap company can do. Because you are profitable. You have, you know, you have your margins. You know what you need and you don't need much more, and you can still grow for VC funded business who wants to dominate the market and has to kind of charge outrageous amounts of money. That is not an option. Is there anything else like this where you can behave differently from your competitors in that regard?

Daniel Fayle
Yeah, well, that's definitely one of them. In terms of, I guess your question is if in terms of aspects of the business, in terms of if we can behave differently. Well, yeah, there's, you know, I think, again, like, I don't wanna sound like I'm bashing any businesses or like that side of things. But like, I really do think like, our customer support is a big thing, like, being able to offer like you said, like, we do have the prices there. I really don't like when I go to a site, I don't have a price. I always just think, well, it's gotta be like, sky high, you know, like, why don't they just show the price? I don't understand. I just wanna see the price. I wanna buy. So that the price is definitely one, customer support is definitely another like just being able to have a personal connection. You know, having those conversations, those onboarding, like I don't know, like, I don't know that the level of customer support some of those business can kind of really give and I don't know. They probably can give it. I just don't know that that's their focus. I think it's more just driving sales and revenue growth and stuff like that, that's fine. But a lot of our growth is actually coming from the customer support side and getting that word of mouth being like, you know, customer support was unbelievable. We got on a phone call. We've gotten a two or three. They're okay with that, you know, spending that extra time going the extra mile. You know, I think that that's enabled us for sure to kind of grow so,

Arvid Kahl
Yeah, that's a wonderful thing. Yeah, that seems to be quite decisive in many markets where people want to trust the vendors that they work with. And if your first point of contact is a customer support agent, that is not just trying to get their ticket then so they can get to the next one. Like, I've been talking to Walmart Canada about some returns recently. And it was horrible, not because the person wasn't nice, but it was because the person had to be nice within the super confined amount of time. So they could go through the tickets quickly, right? And that I hate about customer support when it feels like you're just one in a list. And they have to go through you to get to the end of the day. So yeah.

Daniel Fayle
Yeah, absolutely

Arvid Kahl
Sorry, Walmart Canada, but that was not a nice experience, but it's just, it's customer support. It makes a whole lot of difference, what the first point of contact with your business is for your customers. And if you can afford to focus on that as any business, you really should. Because the word of mouth that you get, like, you were saying that you don't wanna bad mouth anybody in your industry, that is wonderful. And one review on your own website is a customer saying that you were bad mouth by your competitors and then they checked out your product and found it was actually quite awesome. So there is a lot of

Daniel Fayle
Yeah

Arvid Kahl
You know, kind of ruthlessness going on in the industry. Is that right?

Daniel Fayle
Yeah, like yeah, we definitely get some interesting feedback, like, whether it's from, you know, mostly it's from people that are looking to switch over, even though go do the research. Maybe they go talk to the company they're currently using or you know, whichever the marketing firm that's maybe partnered with them. So we've got, yeah, we've gotten some feedback. That's not true. And just, you know, again, it's, you know, one of the things on that side is like, it's at perception, like a lot of those companies have these massive office spaces and kind of these superficial things that obviously on the outside of your customer, oh well, this product must be way better. And the quality of it, the customer support must be way better, and must be more stable, all these things. But really fundamentally, those, that's not really true. So I think getting around that sometimes can be a little bit tough, especially at the start it was, but we still hear that all the time. Like we get that feedback a lot, you know, businesses will say, you know, we kind of went back and were talking to these guys, and they said, you guys are really small. And we have, you know, huge team here. And you know, you don't wanna go with them because they're just too small. They're gonna have lots of bugs and stuff on their software. And, you know, we've heard everything, right? So not true but it's something you have to deal with I think, if you're building a business like we are.

Arvid Kahl
Ever more important than to have customer support or sales team or whoever does your outreach at whatever level, that is humanizing the experience, because that's something they're not gonna get, right? At the much bigger might. That's the thing, I've never understood how bigger means better in regards of software business because to me, bigger just means more process, more abstractions, less individual care. I hate that this kind of what that means it becomes a machine and you become a cog, a tiny little cog in that machine, instead of

Daniel Fayle
Exactly

Arvid Kahl
The mom and pop vibe that you can have, if you have a personal relationship. Like particularly as a founder, if you can still go into the conversation as the founder of the business and say, oh, yeah, this is a customer that has an issue. I'm here for you. I'm expediting this or whatever, that immediately is an experience that this phone or this customer would never get at a much bigger company. So you can kind of leverage these moments very much for the word of mouth that they create. So what I found in your presentation on your website too. You have, I'm just gonna share my own personal perception on this. It looks like a professional software tool, but it does look enterprise-y. You do not try to feel clinical or sterile. It still it feels like a humanized project. I think you're doing pretty well in communicating this and I think that's part of why you have this good word of mouth there. Do you have a design team? Like do you have people like constantly trying to communicate this with your audience?

Daniel Fayle
Yeah, we have one person actually that does our in house as are all our website design. So he's really well. It's Paul, from the team. So he's phenomenal.

Arvid Kahl
Shout out to Paul.

Daniel Fayle
Yeah, he's, yeah, shout out to Paul. So he's done a really good job on that side of things. But kind of going back to your like the previous point, like in terms of like, you know, when you're talking about being a bigger business, and you know, that kind of oh, look that kind of, you know, that feedback that we got that might have been a little bit negative, that actually kind of turned into opening up our self sign up and our free trial, right? So we never had a free trial either to begin with. But the more and more feedback we got about, hey, you know, we don't want to because we never had any contracts. But they were a lot of people were hesitant because we're so small to switch over, like, what if we don't get the same customer support? What if the software is not as good, because obviously, our pricing was was quite a bit lower, or it just seems really affordable to people. But that's what we opened that up, we said, hey, you can test on all our features test drive the whole product for 14 days, if you want, if you need shoot us an email, we'll extend that to 30 days. So there's really no risk here. We don't ask for a credit card, you can you can set up, download the mobile app, send out a bunch of text, use all the features, you can hop on a video call if you want with their stuff, send out a quick like a just blanket invoice, you essentially just use all the features. And then, you know, either do your comparisons or make your decision based off that. So that that again to is really helped us because again, it takes risk off the table for that those those marketing teams, the business owners, the last thing they want to do is either if they're switching from from a different product or different service, kind of figure out, you know, is because what they're maybe being told or that internal discussion is if it's so affordable or so cheap, it must be related to the quality of the service of the product, which Yeah, so that was one big thing that we did that was hugely helpful in the business. So

Arvid Kahl
that is, that's a great idea, like giving people the option to kind of fight their own prejudice. And that moment by just seeing how well it works, I think a free trial is is a great idea for most software service business businesses, because it marginally increases your cost, right. I mean, with Twilio and stuff, I guess you have cost to send messages. Yeah, it's not just an email, right. But I think the customer acquisition costs of that can be calculated, and you can probably set limits, do you have limits in your trial? Or is it a full experience of the whole product?

Daniel Fayle
i Yeah, so we have some limits, I think you can send out 200 text messages. Good. We have a we have a bot, we have a feature that you can send out bulk messages from emotions. So I mean, if we did the free trial, and they said they'll tend to leave messages, we'd be eating quite a bit at cost for a free trial. So we set it up in a way that there's a little bit of a cost, but also, it's fair, you know, they shouldn't have any trouble if they're sending out 200 messages, they they should know that the product works and they like it and whatnot.

Arvid Kahl
At the at the point where they sent like the 199 message, they should know that that the other 198 before have actually worked in their favor, right. Like that's, that's to be expected. I think limits it's a big deal like with with any kind of Free Trial or freemium product, like people forget to set these limits sometimes and then it becomes this kind of explosive cost. And then it could destabilize the whole business. So Good on you for for having those limits in place. I think it's a it's easy to forget that, you know,

Daniel Fayle
I think I think we actually set the limit after we had one of those cases. Yeah, I've just like learned, but you know, I guess but yeah, we had I think we had somebody, they basically use the free trial, we didn't have a limit setup. So they sent like a couple 1000 It wasn't a big deal. But we kind of said, well, like if it was more it might have been a bit. It would have just been annoying. But yeah, we had definitely a case and that's when we kind of made this

Arvid Kahl
Saturday ever. Did they turn into a customer that they convert?

Daniel Fayle
Yeah, I think they did. It was a it was an auto place. And they still use our product and send out mass messages. So it's worth it. It's worth it. I guess.

Arvid Kahl
That's that's really cool. And I'm, I'm super interested in the fact that you're working with like SMS technology, because I feel like coming from this indie hacker space where everything is super modern in the hype, and you know, you only go for the most modern technologies, working with something as relatively traditional, which, you know, like in modern technology terms that could just be like 1010 years old, in terms of a tech but like as sending short messages or like even phone calls who like that kind of oldish technology. Like that's is the choosing to work with that technology is an interesting choice for a software business. I always feel like because you know, we always look at what is the most modern way of reaching people, but not what is the way that people actually still use? So that was a great choice. Is that something that you had on your your radar from the start when you when you did in the walking into the first restaurants and dental practices or did that come at a later point?

Daniel Fayle
Yeah, it was always there was always tech space. So it was always when you again going back to the original product where they could sign in. We really I don't know why but I guess I mean, there was a Only two channels that we thought over, I think were just that made any sort of sense with that product was SMS and email, and email, we're like, Well, who checks your email emails on as quick, they're not going to maybe open it, it's not gonna be effective. Everybody always gets those emails that they just kind of ignored. So we just thought text was really cool. And so when we went mainly with that, we actually I think we had an option where you can only they can only throw in their number at one point, and kind of got rid of email, or maybe we just made it an option. But essentially, we saw those campaigns going out those promotions, those texts, and then we the feedback we got was, Wow, we got to, like 100 people came and there was there's a business, one of our first businesses that we worked with, sent out a campaign after the Jets game here. And they're just down the street from their, their arena. And they said, Yeah, we had, like 5070 people come in just because of this. And they so they always sent out these campaigns, and just engage with people like that. So we just, when we got that feedback, we're like, yeah, SMS it works. It's, it's, it's maybe not last year, or cool. It's not like, we have some like AI technology on like people said or anything, it's just literally you can throw your number, send a message, and then you can text back and forth with the customer. No, because because it works, right? It works and the business, and the business likes it. Yeah. And then we we kind of branched out to the other channels, of course, like, we recently got Instagram. So Instagram was was really big with like jewelry stores and stuff and just a bunch of different on the retail side. And then the Google My Business. So if they went to your Google profile, and they sent you a message coming through us, if they are going to Facebook, your business profile is coming through us Instagram, web chat, tech school landlines, you can make your landline textbooks they call our Texas here. So all those different channels, we just boiled into one one platform, so it was easy for them to manage and have to login.

Arvid Kahl
The big lesson here that I am currently working through in my mind is like use the tech that your customers use. Very simple, right? Like what they need to say if that is what you should supply, not what you think they should have, but what they think they should have. That makes a lot of sense to me.

Daniel Fayle
Yeah. Oh, for sure. Yeah. And that's kind of how we added those channels too. Because I think the start was just text, and then some some email. And then then it was, you know, web chat for their site. And then we just got asked about like Facebook and Google and Instagram and stuff. So we just, we're just trying to add as many channels as we can really moving forward. Do you

Arvid Kahl
feel that this might at some point be too much to handle because you know, like feature writers where you have the this growth of features and integrations and all of a sudden, what used to be a pretty streamlined platform is now this behemoth. Like with eyes all over the place, like Oh, weird tentacles on the side? Do you ever fear that this might turn your product into, you know, more of a bloated product? Or is there a process behind how you choose what to support?

Daniel Fayle
Um, no, I don't I don't fear that. Now. I think we got more on the enterprise side of things than then maybe. Because there's a lot there's a lot going on, and just the customer support products out there, like ones that we use and love intercom. And obviously, there's Zendesk and a bunch of others. I think some of those products. Are they have a lot going on? I don't, I don't think we'll get there for a while. And it's not something that we're worried about. But yeah, that answers that.

Arvid Kahl
Yeah. I mean, you have to kind of keep these things on your radar. But if you're if you're careful with it, then you know, like, you're not going to overload your own business, particularly not if you only have limited resources as a bootstrapper. And that kind of brings me to the kind of the final question that I have, because it is about, you know, the future of the business, since you've been bootstrapped all this time. Do you want to keep doing this earlier? You mentioned something about maybe raise in the future, like, what is your, your vision of the future of the business?

Daniel Fayle
Yeah, so I mean, we we've talked about, if you're asking like potentially raising I don't, you know, I don't looking back, I think we did it because we we didn't, we didn't really know how to get go out and raise and do all that stuff. And I think being in Canada, especially when it makes a little bit different the market. So I think we were kind of forced to be bootstrapped. But now when I look back, I think for sure, right now we're kind of focused on what we're doing. Like we're growing profitably, we're doing I think we're doing things the right way. But the future like, you know, if you look at some businesses, like Shopify Qualtrics like there's there's certain businesses that raised after 10 years, like a so long time, right? So I, I really love that path in the sense that you, you know, you're bootstrapping, you're getting your first 1000 to, you know, whatever, five 6000 customers, maybe it's more, maybe it's 10, whatever it might be. But you're really figuring all that stuff out, and the direction and your company in terms of what you what you really want to be bootstrapped. And you're not, you know, taking money from from somebody and trying to use their money to figure it out. And I again, it goes back to the foundation, that that we're kind of laying, you know, in the mindset that when people come work for us, it's just different than we got all this money, we can just try all these different things, and whatever works great, whatever, it doesn't doesn't matter. But I think I really do think it's important to be bootstrapped for a decent amount of time. And then if Yeah, if you want to raise and kind of, once you've, you know, figured everything out, or a lot of things out, you can take money and just basically pour gas on the fire and just kind of scale. At that point. I, I look at some of those companies, I think their trajectory, and the way they did things was just the right you know, the right path. Or, or just the path, I guess I shouldn't say the right path, but like the path that if we were going to go raise, we'd want to, we'd want to do something similar. But I also to like, I wouldn't have any problem with being bootstrapped forever. There's nothing wrong with it, you know, we, we scale, we need more salespeople will hire more salespeople, because that's what we need. And we've grown to that. And we can afford that. And we can, again, do it on a level that's profitable. So I think that's good, or you need customer support, the more devs whichever, so I think, especially with times like today, like are times like, you know, today, like you look at some of the people are talking about the recession, and you know, what's going to happen with companies that need investors or need more investment for the next year? That can be pretty scary, right? So we're not in that boat. Like, we're not worried. We're not We're not sitting here going, oh, man, are we going to be able to raise an extra $20 million? We don't need that money? We don't? We don't need anything. So. Yeah. So I think long, long term vision, I think, probably bootstrap Pro for a while.

Arvid Kahl
That sounds like sounds like a nice, yeah, that would be great. Right? If that could be sustained. And it would get you to where you want to be like, obviously, you don't have to do anything else. And I think you're absolutely right, with the recession, if you know, like you have a churn rate of X percent, you have a growth rate of y percent, and you have that money in the bank. And, you know, you know, what's going to come over the next couple of months, and maybe this fluctuates, but you still you don't you're not beholden to anybody else's, like revenue expectations, or, you know, growth expectations. That said, obviously, great to know that you can bootstrap forever. But you know, like, at this point with two ish million in annual revenue, and you know, the four founders that probably have, like, you know, certain levels of shares, and the multiples that you could get if you were to sell your business has an exit and acquisition ever be on your radar? Uh, personally, and for the business, I guess?

Daniel Fayle
Yeah, I for a little bit, it kind of was we've definitely, definitely kind of looked down that path. And, and, but, you know, when we what, you know, when we kind of took a deeper dive in that it was like, like, like, for me, for sure. And I think I could speak for the other founders. But we like what we're doing. We're happy, we're not stressed, we don't need to hit these these crazy, these crazy growth goals. We love just building on new products, talking to customers, new features, party with new associations. So like what we do, like I sometimes come to work and like Office, I'm like, I don't even feel like I'm work. And so like, if I were to sell it, that'd be great. But then what am I doing? Like when we're going back somewhere else? Like, well, not that you have Excel, but I mean, yeah,

Arvid Kahl
yeah. If you have something Why would you give it up? Right? I think that as it forever project, that is also perfectly fine way of approaching building a business, right? You can make it sellable, but and never sell it, it's still going to be a great business that somebody would want to buy, but you don't have to give it away. I was recently talking with Andrew Koseki on the show. And he was saying that, from his observations of looking at businesses being sold on micro require, he was telling me that there is this kind of Whole New World as a $10 million arr. And an over that just opens up in terms of the people who would buy your potential business. So you know, like, that's just many, many more investors that are looking for businesses of that size and bigger instead of this kind of smaller, which is a hilarious way to express like a million dollar business, right, but you know, smaller businesses that have a different kind of group of people who would acquire them. So I guess you're on a great path. And if you reach then and when you reach I guess $10 million in annual recurring revenue, then you can read Consider this and see, you know, are we at a point where we want to change our lives or change the things we do. But I love the fact that you want to bootstrap this thing further. I love the fact that it has been bootstrapped until here and that you are apparently doing really well in a competitive market with all these little over bloated competitors in there. I'm super excited to see what the future holds for you. And for check it and for everybody involved with the project. I would like to thank you very much for for being on the show with me today and sharing all these little nuggets of insight and wisdom from a bootstrapped journey to a place where a lot of the people listening to this really want to end up in. So thank you so much. And if people want to follow you and learn more about you, the business and your journey, where should they go? Why should they check you out?

Daniel Fayle
Yeah, thanks for having me on. I appreciate it. Yeah, it's really like our it's like, we don't again, we're not really too good with socials. But I mean, our website, obviously, LinkedIn, we do, we do some posts here. And there. I just gone on Twitter. So if you want to check them out on Twitter, great. But yeah, I would say just our website and just LinkedIn is kind of the main updates. We'll see that so.

Arvid Kahl
Alright, so go check out then and check it. And yeah, just thanks again for being on the show. And have fun keeping some shopping. Thanks. Yeah. Thanks

Daniel Fayle
so much. Appreciate it. Absolutely.

Arvid Kahl
And that's it for today. Thank you for listening to The Bootstrapped Founder. You can find me on twitter at @arvidkahl. You'll find my books and my Twitter course there as well. If you want to support me and the show, please subscribe to my YouTube channel, get to the podcast in your podcast player of choice, and leave a rating and a review by going to (http://ratethispodcast.com/founder). Any of this will help the show. Thank you very much for listening, and have a wonderful day. Bye bye.