331: Geoff Roberts — Playing the Long Game
Download MP3Just kinda threw his hands up, and he was like, we're an early stage company. I'm spending as much time integrating tools as I am building our software. Why hasn't someone built, like, the Shopify for SaaS and made it easy? And it doesn't need to be this infinitely scalable thing. It just needs to get you started quickly.
Arvid:I'm Avidkar, and you're listening to the Bootstrap founder. Today, I'm talking to Jeff Roberts, the cofounder of Outsetta. That's an all in one platform to build SaaS and membership businesses. It's a booster product and it took them four and a half years to get to a point where it really took off. That's a long while And I talked to Jeff about how it came to be, what Outsetter helps people with, what the priorities are in the business, and ultimately, what is happening in the world of SaaS businesses right now.
Arvid:This episode is sponsored by acquire.com. More on that later. Jeff, welcome to the show. With Oudsetta, you're building a platform for people who build businesses on it. And I always wondered, how do you find scope creep?
Arvid:Because all indie hackers wanna build, like, the biggest, most impressive thing, and you build something for other people to build on. How do you fight scope creep in a product that wants to do it all or at least wants to give a lot to your customers? How do you not build or want to build too much?
Geoff:It's a it's a good question. And and first of all, thanks for having me here, Arvid. I'm honored to be on your podcast chatting with your audience. But to to your point, Outset is this huge product. So for people not familiar with it, it's really designed to help you launch a SaaS business.
Geoff:So think about what Shopify did for e commerce. We're sort of doing that for, subscription businesses and SaaS businesses in particular. So the product is a billing system and authentication tool, a CRM and email platform. It has this huge amount of real estate that we cover. But I would say in terms of fighting scope creep, we were very deliberate early on about defining what features the product would have and which ones it wouldn't have.
Geoff:And, basically, what that looked like is we looked at SaaS businesses and we said, what are the core tools that every SaaS business unequivocally needs? And we came up with, you need the billing system to charge your customers. You need authentication to log in and out of your product. CRM, email, and help desk tools were universal, and we said that's it. There's lots of other tools that you might use in the context of building one of these types of businesses, but let's hone in on sort of those 5 core software categories, and build those into the platform.
Arvid:Yeah. That makes sense. Like, core core things will be applicable to everybody. And whatever other things people need, they can build themselves, find their own way. I I wonder because you mentioned, like, 5 core tools or or parts of the stack.
Arvid:Are these equally used by all of your the markets that you serve? Because you have, like, websites as a target market, SaaS businesses, and communities, and they probably have a different structure in how they approach building their stack. Right?
Geoff:They do a little bit, but what you'll find is although we serve these different types of businesses, the the jobs to be done, so to speak, are very, very similar. So you mentioned SaaS products. We also sell to sort of what I'll call a content driven membership site, or sometimes we're sort of the business management layer for for paid online communities. In either case, there's this recurring billing component. There's the need to log in to the community or the product or the website.
Geoff:There's email as a means of communication. There's help desk as means of providing support to the members of the community or the users of the SaaS product. So we think what we've built, serves those sorts of use cases, even though what's being built is quite different. And our customer base reflects that. A lot of people, and myself included, have thought forever, do we need to niche down?
Geoff:Do we need to pick 1 and just go deep on one of these use cases? But our customer base is pretty evenly evenly split with people getting value out of the product.
Arvid:I guess you you could argue that, like, all these different kinds of businesses ultimately do the same thing. Right? They have a group of people who wanna pay money for a service, and that service is either automatically rendered or part of the the interactive dynamics of a community or that the content structure that other people then consume. And, yeah, it's it's nice to see what really is at the core of a business. I think outside of this just extremely well.
Arvid:It just really boiled down version of the these are the core things. Everything else is kind of fluff. Now I wonder, in in the journey that you've been on with outside, which is now several years, have you ever built something that did not ever, like, get used and you kinda just removed it from the platform again? Like, did you ever build a feature and take it off?
Geoff:Yeah. We have a couple times. I would say that I am the at least internally, like, I am the protector of let's not go build other stuff. My my cofounder, Dimitri, he's he's not wrong. He's way more of a product person than I am, but he has he has come to us a couple times and said, one example is an MPS surveying tool.
Geoff:He said, you know what? All of our customers could get value from this. All these different types of businesses could use this. We should build this. It will add delight.
Geoff:And he's not wrong. But my point is we just have so much real estate to cover anyways. Let's stick with what we've got, make it really, really good, and not expand our worldview more than it needs to be expanded.
Arvid:Yeah. It sounds like a great idea, and that is always dangerous. Right? I I wonder, like, with an NPS thing like this or other things like just surveys in general, do you if you don't build them yourselves, like, how do you approach making them easily integratable into your project?
Geoff:Yeah. So that's kind of a interesting topic with our business in general. In a lot of ways, the connected nature of all of our tools and and sort of the product strategy in general is make it so people don't need as many integrations. Like all the core tools are already talking to each other, but inevitably in any sort of, digital business building, you're going to want to integrate other tools. You can do so via Zapier, via Make, via our APIs, via webhooks.
Geoff:We've got, a lot of ways we can connect to other products.
Arvid:Yeah. That makes sense. I'm I'm always starting with this in my own stuff as well, right, with Podska. And it's like, I have an API. I have several APIs, and they can technically be used as a webhook API.
Arvid:So it's kind of a kind of a make, kind of, you know, all of these things at the same time. Sure. And now just earlier today, I got a tweet by somebody who just tweeted, what is it, add Google login? That was the tweet. That was the full feature request.
Arvid:And, obviously, I don't have that yet, but it is easily easily integrated. I I'm using Laravel for my stuff. So, you know, that there are there are things out there where I can easily use this. And I'm like, should I? Like, is this really giving a benefit to everybody?
Arvid:Like, obviously, it might increase sign ups and it might make integration into Google products easier eventually, but it really isn't right now. So it always feels like integrations in general are always this weird balance of, like, the effort to maintain it and and integrate in the first place versus, you know, the potential downside of spending too much time on something people can't use. How do you deal with this? Do you do this on a per integration level, like, for you guys?
Geoff:Yeah. It's a interesting topic. I would say in a lot of ways, outset is already an opinionated take on what you need and what you don't need. Mhmm. And that actually Google Auth is a perfect example.
Geoff:Our own authentication tool, you can do email and password authentication or Google auth. We thought Google auth was kind of bubbled up to the level that enough people would want it. It should be a part of our our core stack. And part of our sell, to be honest, is to an early stage founder like yourself. You don't need to make these these trade offs as often anymore.
Geoff:If you look back over the history of of SaaS, there's always been a lot of this. I don't know if bravado is the word, but in a good way, look what I didn't build. I didn't build a lost password workflow. I didn't build the ability for a user to change their email address. And part of what we're saying is we built all that stuff so you don't have to.
Geoff:Like, here is a package that gives you all of that scaffolding so you don't have to make these types of trade offs anymore. And and that's actually with developers in particular, that is a big part of our initial sell at this point.
Arvid:Yeah. I bet it is. Like, to me, there are 2 kinds of developers at least. Like, there's a spectrum. But, like, the ones who really embrace things that other people have built for them Yep.
Arvid:And and then the exact opposite of, you know, like, the people who are like, I can build this so much faster, and I can build this so much more customizable and all of that. What do you say to these people? Because, obviously, both are kind of extremes. Right? There there is a middle ground.
Arvid:But how how how do you try to convince people who are so into building everything in house because they think they have more control over it Totally. Particularly with, like, payment and, authentication features. What do you say to them?
Geoff:Honestly, I stopped trying. I think I think I think one of the big mistakes we made in the the early days of outset is we were focused entirely on an audience of developers. And I would be on sales calls, and I would be trying to do exactly what you just mentioned. I'd be trying to change the default behavior of the developer who just wanted to build everything. And they would sit there, and they would intellectually agree with me, and then they would go and just build everything anyways.
Geoff:So we we realized pretty quickly that that was sort of a fool's errand. We got dragged into the no code world, and part of what we realized in the no code world was you have this whole set of people that wanna build stuff and don't have the technical skill set to integrate all these tools. So Outsetta automatically sort of has even more value to them. And then on the developer side of things, we found there is that developer that leans into using other tools, that values speed to market, that launches products routinely and can get value from something like Outsetter repeatedly. Those tend to be our developer customers.
Arvid:Would you embrace the no code world initially even more if you were to build a new product, something in in the whatever space it might might be in. I think there's a lot of people who just wanna kinda connect with stuff instead of building code. Would would you go into that as a potential prospective market?
Geoff:I I think I I am very bullish on no code, in in general. I think people look at no code, and they say, oh, it's got its limitations. You can't, you know, build the same caliber of stuff that you can build with code and whatnot. But from my mindset, it's about enabling a group of people to do something that they couldn't do prior. And I'm I'm the perfect example.
Geoff:I'm a relatively nontechnical founder. The amount of stuff that I can build today with no code, I could never have built 5 or 10 years ago. So I don't know that I would necessarily just, like, look at no code as a market that I need to move into regardless of what I'm building. But I wish that outside I had looked into no code as a potential target market earlier than we did. Yeah.
Arvid:Yeah. I guess that's that's a problem. If you are a developer or if you're capable of building these things, you forget that there are people out there that don't. You know? Like, that that are at a at a different stage, and they don't even wanna be a developer, which is that's that's the weird thing.
Arvid:Right? Yeah. Like, we love our stuff so much that we automatically project this onto everybody else as well, which I find myself doing, building an API. I'm like, yeah. I'm gonna put this field in there, and then it's gonna be that.
Arvid:But people just want a thing that can easily connect into what they already have. Right? Just the whole jobs to be done thing you mentioned earlier. They have a job, needs to be done. Doesn't matter how.
Arvid:The easier, the better. And they don't want a cool technical solution. They want it solved. That's all.
Geoff:Yeah. I've actually been talking about this this topic in the design world a little bit too. So in the design world, you know, Framer and Webflow are incredibly popular, incredibly powerful. They deserve all the, you know, credit and accolades that they get. But everyone kind of rags on Squarespace as being this basic product that doesn't give you the same degree of design flexibility.
Geoff:And that's all well and true, but the reality is Squarespace is many, many multiples the size of Webflow and and Framer because they sell to the masses, and they've, made it easy for the masses to build something that looks good.
Arvid:Yeah. Oh, for sure. Squarespace is so dominantly present in all the YouTube videos I watch. Right? If they can afford to sponsor, like, 100 of 1000 of channels.
Arvid:I don't know how many partnership agreements they have, but they must because I have a wide variety of interests. Right? And and they're everywhere. So either they they spend a lot of money, which they do, or they know exactly what I like, and I think it's the money part. Right?
Arvid:So that they a company that can afford this must have a product that really works. And I agree. Like, it it is the ultimate no code tool. I I really love love this about them.
Geoff:They're doing a a $1,000,000,000 in revenue as of last year, so pretty pretty impressive.
Arvid:Well, this episode is not sponsored by us. Maybe it should be. But honestly, for for founders that and that's the thing. Like, outset is is kind of the Squarespace with with an opinion and a a more niche market. Kind of what what he just said and the people who wanna build it themselves, they're not your market.
Arvid:Well, yeah. Your niche is people who wanna get things done. That's how it feels to me.
Geoff:A 100%. A 100%.
Arvid:Does this have anything to do with the fact that you yourself bootstrapped the the business around it? Was it kind of a, we have to make this in a way, that appeals to bootstrappers because it was itself a bootstrapped business?
Geoff:I don't I don't know that I would classify it that way, but it was definite like, the idea came from another SaaS company, that my myself and my now co founder Dimitri were building. And we took the traditional route in that company that you see every SaaS company take and I was kind of the annoying business guy. He was the technical, CTO of the company. And I was saying, you know, we need to integrate Stripe, with Chargebee, with Salesforce, with HubSpot, with Zendesk, with Chartmogul, all all these different tools. And he just kinda threw his hands up, and he was like, we're an early stage company.
Geoff:I'm spending as much time integrating tools as I am building our software. Why hasn't someone built, like, the Shopify for SaaS and made it easy? And it doesn't need to be this infinitely scalable thing. It just needs to get you started quickly. So that that's where it all came from, and we sort of built a early version of outside it in the context of that business.
Geoff:And when we were ready to work on something new, we said, you know what? That thing that we built was kinda nice. Let's productize it and work on that next.
Arvid:What's the the time frame for this? What's the the history of Outsetta here? When did that start?
Geoff:So Outsetta, Outsetta started at the very end of 2016. So we're a 7 and a half year old business now. Okay. Yeah. 7a half year old business now.
Geoff:But the company we worked at prior, I joined in 2010. We worked on that business. It was called Buildium for for 5 or 6 years. Buildium went through an acquisition. The cofounder of Buildium was my now cofounder, Dimitri.
Geoff:And and he said, okay. I've exited this business. Let's go work on something new. Let's take that tech stack that we built to market and see if we can build a business around it.
Arvid:And all those 7 years were probably just fun and games with no problems whatsoever. Right?
Geoff:No. We we've had, we've never been a rocket ship. That's the first thing I I tell people. We purposely picked an idea that we said we're gonna devote 15 years to. And I know a lot of people say that, but I I can promise you, like, that's what the whole discussion centered around.
Geoff:It was what is something big and media enough and also durable enough that we think this will be relevant 15 years later? And that's part of the reason we like this idea. We said people are gonna need billing systems. People are gonna need CRMs. People are gonna need email tools.
Geoff:We just need to give ourselves enough time to build something really compelling. And it took 2 years to deliver even what I would call the MVP. I tell people we struggled pretty mightily between years 2 4. During that time, we were solely focused on selling to developers. And in my opinion, we were selling a underwhelming product.
Geoff:So, you know, why why would people buy it? It wasn't good enough yet, and developers are generally tough customers to sell to. And then, really, years 5, 6, and 7, the business kinda took off, and things have been going pretty well. So, it's a it's a 7 night semi success.
Arvid:Yeah. That's right. I I I just the the phrase years 5, 6, and 7, things took off. I mean, that's just the reality of business. Right?
Arvid:It's it's crazy to think about that you spend 5 years or 4a half or whatever trying to get there. Like, that is a lot of time. That's a lot of dedication. 15 years. How did you get to that number?
Geoff:The previous business, Buildium, from start to exit, was a 15 year endeavor. And there wasn't anything magic about that 15 year time period, but, it was also a big platform solution with a lot of parallels to outset. So we kinda said, you know what? If especially if we're gonna bootstrap this the whole way, we need to give ourselves time to build not 1, but really 4 or 5 software products to the point where they're competitive. We need a good chunk of time.
Geoff:15 years seems about right.
Arvid:That's that is quite the commitment. And I I really love this for you that you found a cofounder that you had no problem saying, I'm gonna spend 15 years with you, dude. I think that's, that's very strong signal for a relationship between founders. I think that's really cool.
Geoff:Thank you. If we if we have gotten anything right in the entire business, in my opinion, it is the the cofounding team. First of all, we'd all worked together previously for an extended period of time. So, you know, you try before you buy, so to speak. We just had a lot of philosophical alignment on what we wanted to get out of the company.
Geoff:We had very complimentary skills. We haven't won the whole time. We've had something of a tough road, particularly in the early years, and there's been zero fighting, zero wavering of commitment. It's it's really the reason I feel lucky to wake up and and work with these people every day.
Arvid:Yeah. That that is lucky, and it's something you made happen. Right? It's like both of these things. I love this.
Arvid:You you said, alignment. That's that's a phrase that that immediately rings a bell in my mind. Because over the last couple of weeks months, Twitter has been full of conversations about, you know, like, funding in particular. That's that's something where alignment always comes in. And you said you bootstrapped the business very intentionally.
Arvid:Did you, from the beginning, just say we're gonna bootstrap this and we're not gonna raise? Was that an intentional choice?
Geoff:It was very, very intentional. In a lot of ways, outset was looking at this previous SaaS business building and then saying, what would we do differently the next time around if we can start with a fresh slate? And we came out of that saying we wanna remain bootstrapped and small and independent by design. That was very intentional, but we also chose a big idea. And the idea was, you know, we wanted something that would hold our attention for 15 years.
Geoff:And while that sounds like a nice idea, in reality, I I think there was some misalignment there. I think if you're going to bootstrap, you want to pick something relatively small, because you can build something good that much faster and, you know, get revenue coming in the door and whatnot. If I did it again, I think the desire to bootstrap came from the right place, but it wasn't necessarily something that worked particularly well with a product of outseta's size. And that's why it took us so long to get the business really kicked into gear.
Arvid:So would you bootstrap it again if you had the chance to do it over?
Geoff:I would not. I would not bootstrap outset itself again. I would go back. I would pick the same cofounders. I would pick a different idea if we said bootstrapping is something that is nonnegotiable for us.
Geoff:I'm the first one to tell you that it's to our benefit today, but it was kind of it was painful to get to this point, and I wouldn't be thrilled to sort of jump back through that again.
Arvid:Yeah. It's it's it sounds like there were a couple points in time where, did you ever think, well, let's let's just stop this at any point?
Geoff:We had myself, in particular, had a very serious period of soul searching. So about 3 years in, we were at close to 0 in terms of revenue. I forget the actual number, but it was, you know, a few $1,000 in MRR. It was it was low. We've been putting in 3 years of diligent effort.
Geoff:I found out unexpectedly that I was having twins. And then a pandemic hit. And my wife and I both lost our, primary source of income. Mine was consulting. Hers was her actual full time job.
Geoff:So sitting there at that point, you know, with all the uncertainty of of COVID, with no paycheck, with 2 kids on the way, and with very little traction in the business, you know, I was scratching my head long and hard. And, realistically, like, it's not something I would say I am proud of. I don't think there was really a rational argument to say keep going. Frankly, the reason I decided to was my cofounders. I I looked up and I said, I'm working with the right people.
Geoff:We have the right team. I still believe we can turn this into something if we just give ourselves time to let the product mature. So we continued on in it, and it worked out. But, there was definitely a lot of soul searching at that point.
Arvid:Yeah. That sounds about right. I mean, 3 years in, right, and and seeing not the success you wanted, that probably does something. But how did you get get yourself out of that? Like like, was there was there anything that helped you see the vision and the the trajectory of the business at that point?
Arvid:Because I I know a lot of people listening to this right now probably are at that point. So if you have any tips, please.
Geoff:Yeah. I I I really think, like, the the primary thing was knowing that I was working with the right people. I said if I I if I stop this, I could go get a full time job. Sure. You know, I've I've done that before, but I wouldn't want to.
Geoff:I would wanna work on another start up, and I would wanna work with these guys. So so that was the main thing. I think the other thing that really helped was that we had picked this very durable idea. This was not an instance where the business was failing because we hadn't validated our idea well enough. Like, we knew people needed billing systems and CRMs and email tools.
Geoff:So I knew it was a matter of, can we build something good enough and how quickly? And I, you know, sort of said, okay. Let's do everything we can to stay alive as long as possible and give ourselves time to mature the product. And, really, yes, the move into the no code world was something that kick started our growth a bit. But more than anything, it was just the product getting better.
Arvid:Was there anything particular about the product changing that kicked it off that kind of flipped the switch?
Geoff:I think if we could go back and do it again, at its core, outside it is a payments and authentication product. It is certainly like, the value of the product is delivered by the all in one nature of the product, but people buy because they need payments and authentication. They grow into everything else thereafter. And I think we focused on other areas of the product a little bit too much too early. If I could go back, I would make payments and authentication rock solid as soon as we could and then kind of, you know, let the other stuff mature more gradually over time.
Arvid:So all the the five core functionalities, they are in order, apparently. Yep. That is that is an interesting insight. Right? They are all core, but they happen in succession Yeah.
Arvid:In in in terms of relevance. That's what I hear. Yep. Oh, that's cool. Totally.
Arvid:Very nice. That that's that's an interesting insight. I'm gonna I'm gonna take that to heart with my own product because I you know, like, there are a lot of things that people want, but they want them in order. I think that's also I guess that's a job to be done thing. How often do you talk to your customers, right now at this point?
Geoff:Oh, man. This is I have an abnormal answer to this, and and this is not me tooting my own horn. But I don't I don't know that there's ever been a founder in the history of the world that has talked to their customers more than me. I literally talk to customers all day every day, and it is not from a place of, like, I believe in user research more than anybody else, and I'm doing this intentionally. It's a result of how we run the company.
Geoff:We are trying to stay intentionally small. We are, at this point, 4 engineers, a designer, and myself. So, basically, I spend all of my time trying to figure out how I can give the engineers and the designer as much of their day back as possible to keep pushing the product forward. And that means I am the front lines for everything from product management to support to to to marketing to sales. But I talk to customers all day, every day.
Arvid:That's awesome. I think 7 years in doing this still and not thinking of it as beneath you as a founder, it's great. Like, a lot a lot of people do.
Geoff:There are huge, huge benefits to it. You know, everybody on our team does support. So it's not just me too. It's like everybody in the company is customer facing a significant portion of their day. And you can make an argument that that's not the best use of a expensive software engineer's time.
Geoff:You you can make plenty of arguments, but our issue will never be closeness to the customer.
Arvid:Do you hire, like, specifically with that in mind? Do you hire, like, engineers that are kind of generalist enough to deal with this?
Geoff:Yeah. It's something we make, something we make very apparent to anyone that we bring on to the team, and it's very much nonnegotiable. In a lot of ways, I tell people just point blank, Outsetta is not a great start up idea. We sell to early stage companies that churn at a high rate. We sell a low price point product.
Geoff:There's a lot of things that we have needed to do to make the business viable. And one of those is we don't have a sales team. We don't have a support team. It's a 100% product led growth. Everybody contributes to support.
Geoff:And the thing that I wish more founders knew about similar structures is, of course, this is going to be unpopular, particularly with developers. Developers wanna write code and build stuff. They don't wanna do customer support. But by putting this out there and making it nonnegotiable, people select in or select out. And and the people that, you know, hear that that's a a way that we work and aren't concerned with it or or even embrace it are happy to outside it, and those that aren't gonna be happy doing that, go elsewhere.
Arvid:Yeah. Allowing people to self select in and out of your workforce, that's just a good start. Thing and I love this. I love that this is so important to you that even if the 100 x ninja engineer came, you know, past your door, if they didn't wanna talk to customers, they wouldn't get a job.
Johannes:Not negotiable. Yep.
Arvid:Yeah. I love that. I heard from several sources that Outsetta has a really interesting compensation model. What is it, firstly, and and then how does it affect, like, your employee retention and, you know, like, people's, investment in the company?
Geoff:Yeah. This is this is the part of the business, honestly, that gets me the most fired up. I I'd love this stuff. I always describe as I I'm more of a, like, a startup junkie than a technologist personally. But the compensation model, we we call it a choose your own adventure compensation model, and there's sort of 3 ideas.
Geoff:The first one is we pay everybody the same, and it's based on a full time salary of $210,000 per year. The second piece is everybody can choose to work anywhere from 1 to 5 days per week. And the third is everybody earns equity in the business on the same terms as our founders. So the idea is you can show up and if you wanna work one day a week for cash compensation, it's $42,000 per year. 2 days a week is 84, all the way up to the fully ramped salary.
Geoff:And you can also say, okay. I wanna work, you know, 3 days a week for cash compensation and 2 days a week earning equity in the business and kinda, build a compensation plan that that works best for you and and your interests.
Arvid:That's really cool. That that sounds that sounds incredible. And, like, immediately, I go my mind goes to edge cases and does this scale, but that does, you know, doesn't matter? I think it's just great that you do it in the first place. That's really cool.
Geoff:Yeah. Couple couple things there. I the the question is always, does this scale? And my response is always, it doesn't need to. We want to we want to keep the company, relatively small in terms of headcount by design.
Geoff:We We don't wanna put, like, an artificial cap on anything, but we've always said, let's see how far we can push out Sato with 20 people. And I I think we can push it pretty darn far with 20 people, and this scales within the context of a 20 person team. I I have no doubt about that.
Arvid:At this point, I wonder, like, what would a 20 people outsider look like? Would that mean that the product explodes into different verticals, or would it just be a better product or more service? Like, have you thought about, like, what your growth internal growth trajectory is gonna look like over the next seven and a half years, you know, to reach the 15?
Geoff:Yeah. I I don't think it comes personally, I don't think it comes from new markets. I think it comes from the product continuing to mature and getting to the point where Outsetta is just more of a household name in the circles that we already swim in. If you if you talk to a SaaS founder, if you talk membership sites is maybe different, but outside of it is not, like, the default, oh, I'm building a SaaS business. I need to use outside of the way that Shopify is with with ecommerce.
Geoff:And, I don't know that we're ever going to get there, but I think it is just capturing more market share, having more people look at outside as a viable alternative to piecemealing together their tech stack and also to an extent selling to slightly larger customers. I I definitely don't think we're gonna go up market. We are sort of intentionally serving the lower end of the market. But there's a big difference between, you know, the month to start up and the start up that's doing a $1,000,000 a year in revenue. I think as we get more of those $1,000,000 a year in revenue customers, we'll have a need for more headcount.
Arvid:It must be really cool for you to see all these businesses building their business on top of your platform. Like, I right. How how how does it feel? Like, what do you see? Is there anything really exciting and cool happening there?
Geoff:Yeah. It's it's awesome. That's that's one of my favorite parts of the business, point blank. So we we basically give the product away for a artificially inexpensive subscription fee. How we make money is we take a 1% cut on successfully processed payments.
Geoff:So the idea is when our customers grow, we grow. And a fun way to look at it is we're sort of a 1% investor in all of our business in, like, all of our customers. And, there's a lot of alignment between like, we bend over backwards to help them outside of our product, however we can grow, because it also benefits our our business. And it's really, really fun from that perspective. The thing that I, like, have learned more than anything selling to so many early stage companies is there's there's 2 types of founders.
Geoff:There's the founders that see an obstacle and every obstacle becomes a problem, and they want to do things a certain way, and if they can't, they just feel stuck and they pull their hair out and and that kind of stuff. And then there's the founder who sees an obstacle and they're just like, what's the absolute fastest way around it? And that second that second founder, those are the businesses that go on to to be successful. So I spend a lot of my time working with customers, trying to get them to adopt that mindset and simplify what they're trying to do and all those sorts of things because that's what I see correlate with success, much more than any other, like, executional strategy.
Arvid:That's cool. It's cool that you get to actually see it in the numbers. Like, it literally it pays off for them and for you if it works. So that's that's pretty strong metrics driven development there. I love this.
Arvid:So, yeah, what do you see in terms of trends in the industry? Like, what what are the the businesses being built right now that maybe a couple years ago did not exist?
Geoff:Yeah. I mean, obviously, there's AI stuff. We have tons of AI startups, launching on outside. Those those are sort of a blessing and a curse, I would say, so far. You know, they tend to come out of the gates and do revenue quite quickly.
Geoff:Most of them, as you hear, run into pretty substantial problems with churn. So it's kinda like, you know, I have mixed feelings about about some of those. I think the biggest thing that I've really seen through our focus on the the no code world in particular is more people realizing that they can launch digital businesses themselves. And and that's such a cool cool thing to see.
Arvid:Yeah. Yeah. That's great. And that that is ultimately why this podcast exists and why we go to conferences like MicroConf where we met a couple months ago Yep. And hang out with people.
Arvid:And why we both are active on Twitter trying to share what we know. Right? Like, that's that's that's ultimately like, we are trying to be part of a an uplifting movement inside of our communities
Louie:A 100%.
Arvid:To empower more people to start businesses. I love this. Man, this is pretty cool. And thank you so much for sharing all of this. This is it's very very for somebody who's trying to be one of those founders who try to take the fastest path around the obstacle, this is quite alluring.
Arvid:So it's really cool. If people wanna find out more about Ocetto or and you, where do you want them to go?
Geoff:Outset dot com, it's just the word outset and then throw an a on the end. Or, for me, on Twitter or LinkedIn, on Twitter at Jeff t roberts, and I'm a I'm a g e o f f.
Arvid:You're a g e o f f. That's awesome. Well, g e o f f, thank you so much for everything you said and and explained today. I'm I'm really excited for the next seven and a half years of journey for Odessa. I'm looking forward to seeing you climb in the to the the echelon of bootstrap businesses even further.
Arvid:It's really cool. Thank you so much for being on today.
Geoff:Thanks so much for having me, Arvid. This was fun.
Arvid:And that's it for today. This episode was sponsored by acquire.com. If you're looking for a platform to turn your multiyearfounder efforts into life changing amounts of money, I highly recommend listing your business right there. Go to try. Acquire.com/arbit and check it out for yourself.
Arvid:Thank you for listening to the Bootstrap founder today. If you wanna support me and this show, tell everyone you know about PodScan.otherfam and share your favorite episode of this podcast with them too. I really appreciate it. Have a wonderful day, and bye bye.
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