401: Vova Feldman — Mastering Entrepreneurship in the Payments Sector
Download MP3Hey. It's Arvid, and this is the Bootstrap founder. Today, I'm talking to Vova Feldman of the merchant of record payment provider Freemius. 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. 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.
Arvid: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. Let's dive in. Here's Vova.
Arvid:Vova, hi, and welcome to the show. You've been bootstrapping for ten years now. Now that is mighty impressive. Most people really don't make it anyway. They give up after the first couple months, if not a couple weeks even if they don't see results.
Arvid:How did you stick around for this long?
Vova:Yeah, it's a really great question. I think the first main reason for that is that I'm really excited about the problem that I'm solving. It's something that I personally faced. I built this micro SaaS in the past and tried to monetize that joint with another guy, we spent like a year working on it. And in the end, we kind of discovered that basically the whole like monetization part of things is way more complex, time consuming than actually building the product.
Vova:So that got me to this realization that there is a bigger problem and something that I solved. So I was very passionate to basically take something that I faced and try to bring it to the world. Another thing is focusing on the target audience that I personally relate with. It's like people like me, right? So I know the language, I know the people, I like to hang with those people to, you know, have a beer in a conference together, chat about business challenges.
Vova:So the problem and the audience are very close to my heart. Another thing is having a very big vision. I think that at least for me, and I think many people who are, you know, founders, they're basically high achievers, they want to do great things. And what really pushes them is constantly growing, learning new things and building something bigger. And if your vision mission is like quite small, you get to a certain point that you feel, okay, what's next?
Vova:I don't know, whether you're growing or not. But in terms of 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. So what happened to me personally, I'm coming from a traditional startup background, went through the VC route and startup accelerators, in Techstars Boston, another accelerator in Silicon Valley. So when I started with Freemius, that was my natural route. This is what I knew.
Vova:I opened a US incorporation, no LLC, straight to, had a stock option for future employees that was all based on the template that I learned. And I went to this hunt of raising money, I went to the Silicon Valley to Boston area. In order to pitch to VCs, you have to have grand vision to show that mega market and you can't just pitch what most of us are doing, starting very small, validating, it's just not enough. You have to force yourself thinking about a much bigger problem. Like, okay, this is what I'm tackling the story need to make sense, right?
Vova:You have to show this billion dollar opportunity in order to be fundable. So it pushes you to think further down the line in a way that maybe you'll never get there. Right? But there is always some like, further path to go to. So I think, like, we've been focused on specific ecosystem, which is WordPress for so many years.
Vova:But because of going through that initial phase of creating the pitch deck to investors, I always had, okay, what would be the next kind of ecosystem? And we only now, after like nine years, we got to that next phase. 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 seeing myself. It gave us so much energy to get into this whole new ecosystem.
Vova:So I think having that long term vision, it's important. It does add an overhead in the beginning because you need to think through this stuff. But I feel that it's definitely worth it. Another thing that I can think of is that I managed to grow a team. So when you're just alone, it's like really hard to grind for ten years.
Vova: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. And the support probably took me like five years. So it means every time my wife and I were going to a vacation, I'm doing Healthscout tickets in the morning and the evening. You can't do it for ten years, you know?
Arvid:I know, man, unless you have an extremely patient partner. Maybe also somebody who really gets what you're doing. Like, I'm fortunate with that. Like, my partner, we had a business together, like a software business. She gets totally what this is about and why it works.
Arvid:And still, I wanna get into the delegating part much quicker than five years with this thing that I'm building right now because I know it it is stressful and it is anxiety inducing. And everything I hear you say makes perfect sense to me. Like, have this 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. Yet when you put them all together and you're only one person, like, of this is super overwhelming because you have to deal with everything at the same time. Did you put these things in a certain order?
Arvid:Like, did you have a priority when it came to vision first? And then I think about the other thing. Like, how did you struggle with that or how did you organize this in the beginning?
Vova:Yes, so the big vision I was forced because that's the way that I knew. I went to fundraise before I started to code anything. That was my first thing. I worked on slides in the beginning. So that's how it started in terms of the team.
Vova:I did manage to raise some money, but very small from angel investors. And it did help me to get that initial first two years going. But in terms of hiring as a bootstrap business, you're pretty much limited based on you know, your income. So it was very gradual, until we hit a certain point when we had really fast, like rapid growth. And then the challenge was to actually find time to do hiring, because that's extremely time consuming.
Vova:Like in the beginning, when you're, let's say, 123 people, it's okay, everything is moving very fast. 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. It's this like constant battle of Oh, I'm growing the business, 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.
Vova:It's hard to keep up with all those. Like you said, there are so many things that you need to do in parallel. It's very challenging. I can tell you because of the lack of time and the focus of being the CTO and CEO and all these CEOs, I hire the wrong people. Also lack of budget in the beginning if you don't have a good budget to hire, you have to compromise.
Vova:You have to get junior people in the beginning and you need to train them. You also need to become an expert in everything, which is kind of insane, right? Because I learned how to be a marketer and SEO and a developer, a product person, a recruiter. It's awesome. It's awesome that you acquire all those skills, but it's also crazy.
Vova:I want to say that with age, maybe if you're 20 years old, you have fourteen, sixteen hours per day. 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. It's just unrealistic. 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. And that event actually put me like forced me to build a strong team.
Vova:Like I knew that I need to be able to do that. So for about a year, since we got pregnant, you know, was that was my focus. 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. So it's not that, of course, when I'm there, it's like I'm able to push everyone to the right direction, moving faster and everything. But that was the time when I started to think more about annual planning, and everyone needs to know exactly what they need to do.
Vova:Being less opportunistic and kind of improvising on the fly, actually being more methodological in terms of a roadmap, we have to stick with it, this is what everyone is doing. All those life changes, they're forcing you to do some things. But it's awesome, because also for me, you know, like, love coding. I don't do
Arvid:it anymore.
Vova:Unfortunately, I really miss that. But I acquired so many new skills right now, you know, so today, I'm focused on recruitment on talking, podcasting, all those things that, like, you may find it surprising. I'm introvert, like many people in our ecosystem. But once you go to 100 conferences, you'll learn how to talk with people.
Arvid:Yeah. I could tell when I met you in microconf this time around this year that you're comfortable there. Right? 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. That is cool.
Arvid: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? 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, that is something that to me often sounds like, Oh yeah, that's what business development people do, Right? That's what this particular part of the business
Vova:Well, I'm I'm still wearing that hat, you know, the business development.
Arvid:Exactly. That's exactly what it is. 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? You sell to entrepreneurs.
Arvid:You sell to founders. So it would be a waste of your connection with them to not do this yourself. Man, I love this kind of dichotomy of delegating because on the one hand, you built a business like a founder, like, became pregnant, need to change stuff. What's my runway? Nine months.
Arvid:Okay. Gotta fix this. Right? This is such a such a founder mode of of changing your own business as well. 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.
Arvid:So it's kind of a balance here. Find it very interesting. That's a very bootstrapper mentality thing, and I'm glad that even ten years into this, you haven't given that up. I think that's very inspirational to see that you can retain this as a founder. You can retain this approach to, let's see.
Arvid:Right? Okay. I have this amount of time. I have these kind of skills. Let's put them to use.
Arvid:And since you were wearing all these hats and you're saying you 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? 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. But let's maybe leave that part aside. So most people who code don't really code that much anymore.
Arvid:A lot of that is just, you know, being a a technical leader in the team and the team members are all virtual. How much do you use AI in your many different hat wearing capacities at this point?
Vova:A lot. A lot, honestly. I mean, not in coding because I don't do that anymore. And I think the part that I'm most passionate about in coding, it's not the coding itself, it's the creation. Right?
Vova:Because it's like 100% productivity. There is no other job in the world that is so productive like coding. I think that part I'm really missing. But in terms of using AI, man, I'm talking with ShedgyPT the entire day, like honestly, because a lot of my work is writing and creating processes, direction, and it's a lot of communications. And this is what AI is really good at.
Vova:It saves me tons of time. I can give an example that earlier this year, we went through a proper OKRs process. And if we've grown, we wanted to, okay, we are getting into like new market, let's do it the right way. And in the beginning, I had a guy that was supposed to become my COO, he left the company, but in the beginning, he kind of supported that process. Then he left, he did train me a little bit, but I was still missing information.
Vova:That's where AI really helped me kind of to fill all the missing gaps in the process. Helped me guiding us through a strategic process of how to do it, the terminology why we do some things. Why is this a practice, etc. Instead of going in, I did a little course as well. But this is like more practical, know, it gives you what needs to be done, and it is just yeah.
Vova:I use AI a lot.
Arvid:Do you see replacing humans in a particular job like a COO? Do you think this can be completely agentic at some point? Like, in the near future. I know that twenty years from now, you know, who knows? I mean, we probably don't even know what's gonna happen next year.
Arvid:But within the next couple months and years, do you see actual AI systems replacing people, like, in a business like yours, or do you still want people there?
Vova:I definitely want people there. I want senior people. This is also something that I realized that there is a like, I'm looking for a players. You know, I tried different things. If you can if you have the budget for a players and you're able to get them, it's a game changer completely bringing peers that can, you know, think with you together, and you're not just telling them what to do.
Vova:And they're way better than what you're doing, whatever role that you're hiring them for. This is a game changer. And this is what I'm aiming for. I think that AI does remove some jobs will some jobs will disappear and move to AI, especially with agents, I definitely think that you still need the human side of things, but some some roles will disappear. You know?
Vova:Yeah. For sure.
Arvid:Things in the balance. Right? You don't really know where the software development is going, like, as an actual job. If it's gonna be more of I'm monitoring a fleet of virtual developers and whichever result is the best is gonna 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, who knows where this is gonna go?
Arvid:I appreciate that you speak about humans. Like, when you say a players, I see, like, somebody who really cares. Right? 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. 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.
Arvid:Right? It doesn't have a deep internal drive other than Not yet. Yeah. Right. To take over the world, maybe.
Arvid:But LLMs try to convince you that they're right. That is not the same as somebody who's motivated to make an impact on the world. So where did you find the people that you hired for Freemius? Because that's one of the things about hiring that freaks me out. I don't know where to look.
Vova: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 we have to work the same time. Otherwise, at least for us, it is not working. Like, this is how I build freemius. And we want to be in sync and run as efficiently as possible. I got people through different channels.
Vova:I think the best and the easiest hires are from referrals from other team members that worked with a person in previous job and saves the time to hire them because they already qualified and just by someone you trust, a trust of a third person. But I also found amazing people through other channels, you know, some of them were using Freemius. So people in the ecosystem, I am looking for people at least in our size, we're 20 right now. We're still small. And I do care to bring people that care about our mission, that are really motivated beyond the doing exceptional job for themselves, but also get excited about the problem we're solving, the people we're serving, so they'll have that passion beyond just executing their job.
Vova:This is a critical part for me. The hiring process evolved over the years, obviously. But I got some people through my personal network. When I was looking for a CTO, I was literally dating with someone on a weekly basis. So it's about sending your arms to all your connections.
Vova:For me, it was the other founders that I know and spreading the word, going to a beer with them, getting them excited about what we're doing. 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. They say, hey, I know this guy, a friend of mine. Right? He's working on something exciting.
Vova:Maybe you should meet. But you have to stay on top of mind. So it took me two years to find the CTO of, like, a lot of beer drinking, honestly.
Arvid:Well, that's that's suffering that I'm willingly gonna do. But, yeah, I mean, that that is impressive. Like, two years of just keeping at it. Again, this is something that most people probably would stop a couple months in. Right?
Arvid:That's something that for most people feel, I'm gonna do something else or I'm gonna, like, get a recruiter to hire one for me, but you stuck with it. That is I just wanna 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. I mean, with Potscan, it took me a year to become profitable. That is enough. Like, a year of not being profitable and trying to be profitable, that is a lot of work.
Arvid:But doing this for two, doing this for four or five, phew, that would be a lot of stress and anxiety. So how did you find this motivation, like, every single day when you did it? Like, what what is the the driving force? I 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 Freemius is because I think that would be very interesting to hear, like, the nuanced take you have. Is the mission enough to stay that focused for that long?
Vova:It's a combination of the mission and the drive to grow. So the mission is helping fellow makers to make a living out of their passion. This is our mission, which turns what we're doing as a passion as well. So it's kind of meta. And it came for a reason, right?
Vova:So it took me many years until I realized that I have to do it. So we've been stuck in this nine to 12 team members for about three years. 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. And I realized that I can't keep, like, I have to bring senior people, I can't keep growing it myself, because you can't hire great people when you don't have the time to invest in them. Simple as that.
Vova:So I realized that if I want to grow beyond that 12 team members, and I felt that we had to because we've grown a lot customer wise, so we have to keep supporting them. Like I have to invest in building a leadership team. So this is what I've done. I had that mission to build that kind of leadership team in that phase. And this is what I started to do, basically, as long as it takes.
Vova: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. So there was no way out of it. I just had to do it. That's how I looked at it.
Arvid:That makes sense. Like, if you have a forcing function like this, that keeps you motivated.
Vova:I mean, I didn't want to sell, you know, so that was not an option for me. And there's no point to close because it's working and it's growing. So I either draw with that or I drown with everything that's happening. Literally drowning because there's like too much operations and all the things that happening that we have to scale the team.
Arvid:Why not sell?
Vova:Because I'm passionate about that. You know, I'm enjoying that. Let's say I'm selling it. Right? What's the outcome?
Vova:I mean, there's financial thingy. I will just add that I already exited the company before. So I do have that cushion. So I don't feel that in stress from a financial perspective. This is definitely important.
Vova:I would say that before you make that first life changing exit, if you have an opportunity to sell, you should definitely consider that. But I didn't have that pressure. I was doing something that I'm really excited about. It's growing very fast. Right?
Vova:So what's the point? To just give it to someone else and then start again from the beginning?
Arvid:Yeah. Right? That's the founder problem. You gotta do something Yeah. And probably something that you're passionate about, so you might build the same thing again.
Arvid: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. Like, that's so funny. Like, the non compete expires and they're right at it again, which is kinda, you you're right. Point is if the passion is in the product itself.
Vova:Yeah. And I had so much more to build and to do, and, like, you know, the vision was there. It's big, and it's still, like, gigantic for me.
Arvid:Did this vision ever change, like, along just the the development of the industry that you were serving over time? Because ten years ago, building a merchant of record, building a payment platform probably looked slightly different than
Vova:it does today. Well, maybe I didn't use the terminology. It wasn't as common. But the whole merchant of record, it was unplanned thingy. Okay, it was for me, I need to solve a problem of taking a product and moving it to a selling solution, right, something that you can sell globally.
Vova:That was the problem I'm trying to solve. And then I looked at the ecosystem, and I see that Stripe and PayPal, they are only available in a limited amount of countries, but the world is much bigger. And I do want those people all over the world to use freemius to solve their pain and solve their problem. So how do I do that? Okay, we need to tackle, we need to take the payments and use our payment gateways.
Vova:So that was the reason it wasn't about, I want to solve sales taxes. No, it's a pain in the ass. I don't want to deal
Arvid:with it.
Vova:Right? But indirectly, get into those problems. You solve them as your personal pain, but it's amazing that it, you know, relieve all the other that are using freemias, that they don't need to deal with that. But it it wasn't about, oh, let's do a merchant of record.
Arvid:Has it become easier to do payments globally? Because in my let's call it naive mind, the Internet economy just gets better and better at building technical solutions. But then I remember when we ran FeedbackPanda, 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 recurring subscriptions going. So things got harder instead of easier. How does that work for you as somebody who just has to take money from hundreds of countries at this point?
Vova:There is always something.
Arvid:Always. Yeah.
Vova:It's never ending. There are regulations coming all the time. Now the next one. The European Union love regulation.
Arvid:They love that. Yeah.
Vova:They're constantly coming with these things. GDPR, EU VAT, you know, like, they are the one that kind of pioneered the whole concept of, you know, let's charge people even if they're the late charge companies, you know, VAT, even though they're not local. And everyone said, oh, you know, they can can I curse in this show? I don't know. Yeah.
Arvid:Sure. If if when it comes to VAT, please do.
Vova:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So everyone said, oh, fuck. There's an opportunity to make more money.
Vova:So all the countries started to kind of follow that pattern, but there is Accessibility Act coming. I mean, the origins of what they're doing make sense in some of the things, but it just keeps adding complexities all the time. And when you have to sell globally and comply with all those regulations, I think that one of the biggest underestimated things are maintenance. Okay, you start collecting, remitting, dealing with taxes or subregulation in one place, but it's not done. You have to constantly keep watching, monitoring what's happening, taxability, classification changing.
Vova:One place is charging SaaS today. Tomorrow, they change the rule or the tax rate is going down or whatever. So you have to, like, monitor all these signals. And, yeah, it's never ending.
Arvid:For a company of 20, that sounds like a lot of work. Like, I would assume that, you know, if you mentioned Stripe and and similar big players in the field, they have thousands of employees. Half of them probably are just lawyers trying to figure all of this out. Right? So even they struggle with that.
Arvid: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, for a team of 20. Like, does that ever make you wanna build out a much bigger company? How do you approach this?
Vova:Yeah. I wanna stay as small as possible as a team, but we do need to grow, and we are hiring. Right? But I don't want to, like, go crazy. Not right now.
Vova:I don't think it's needed in our case, maybe in the future, just in a way that the bigger the organization, things are just slower. That's the way it works. You have more smarter people and you want to hear their advice. So it's just taking longer. You need to brainstorm.
Vova:In the beginning, it's just, let's say, me and a designer, which is okay, on the fly, we take decisions. But now you have, oh, we have the head of brands, so you want to hear the brand. We have the CMO, so you want to hear their head of content. It will be kind of a shame if you don't use them because they're smart people. But it just makes everything much slower.
Vova:Yes, we could use more people. This is why we're hiring. I would say that also unlike mega corporate, we can move faster. We are okay with some risks. We have some exposures that we're just living with, you know, and it's okay.
Vova: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. So we're we're risk takers as a smaller team.
Arvid:That resonates with me because that's just what founders do. Right? Like, if if you serve founders, you might just as well be one, you know, and be a little on the entrepreneurial risk taking side. Makes perfect sense to me. And I think it also impacts how you decide what to do with the business and what you don't do.
Arvid:It feels like you could do everything and even further expose yourself to risks. 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 and the features that you offer are also focused on this. You're not trying to be the solution for everybody everywhere at all times. You're very, very specific in how you approach selling product over the Internet. 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?
Vova:Yep. Yeah. Absolutely. We have. We're limited.
Vova:You know, we can't just build everything. A very common and complimentary request upcoming is why can't we sell services? Right? I'm building a product, but I'm doing some customization work for a client. So why can't we also sell services on top of that?
Vova:They already like, we already have the checkout there. It's just about, let's add another product and plan, but it adds additional exposure and complexities and legal stuff and taxes. We just don't want to get into it. This is not our bread and butter. 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.
Vova:But you can't be us plus offer an Upwork leaving the marketplace aside, but all the entire process of hiring service providers in parallel with 20 team members. It's just not feasible.
Arvid:Yeah. And I think that makes you different in a very good way because you're not even trying to chase that. 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 kinda be a waste of your time, at least now.
Arvid:Right? At least for the existing team, the existing business. How else are you different from, like, existing payment providers in the field?
Vova:So the same way that we didn't start with we wanna be an MOR, the vision was we want to solve the whole commercial aspects of selling software globally, not locally. Locally, it's easier. It's a different set of problems. And one thing that we notice is that software makers, they're 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, like, they need some guidance, or preferably, those things should come built in as part of the solution. The way we look on the problem is we're not only solving the payment or the billing side of things, we're looking on the entire customer lifecycle from before they buy until they cancel and after.
Vova:Someone starts to check out and they abandon before even entering your email with freemius, you can show an exit intent pop up. When someone do enter their email, there's a cart recovery. This is like pre purchase kind of interaction. 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. When they go to cancellation, we have some retention flow.
Vova:Even if they cancel, when they get to license ending to the period of their subscription, We kind of re encourage them try to recover the subscription. There's a lot of those micro interactions through emails, through the checkout, through the customer portal. And with Freemius, we tackle it automatically out of the box. You don't need to think about this stuff. We keep adding those as we go.
Vova:So a big part of the solution is focused on conversion rate optimization and marketing automation built in. You don't need to plug ConvertKit and start thinking, oh, how do I phrase that email? What is the email? In what event do I need to trigger that email? This is all coming out of the box, and The alignment in interest is there because it's a revenue share model.
Vova:The more we can maximize your financial potential, we're benefiting from that directly. This is one pillar, how we are different. The second, like I said, people don't necessarily know how to price package or to do marketing, etc. We take very proactive approach. Do a lot of educational guidance through our different channels, video blog, podcasting, etc.
Vova:But we are also happy to hop on a call with founders and discuss this stuff. How do you package your product? I actually was very, very excited when I went to MicroConf and I met Rob because what he is doing through TinySeed is I felt so much the same stuff that I'm doing with founders through Freemius. We have that interest as well because if they can make more money through packaging, then we are benefiting from that. And the last one, give me give me the third one.
Vova:Sure. Go for it. It's the whole network thing. So just as MicroCone, right, it is critical in order to succeed in business to have a network. So network is a big thing for us.
Vova:The third pillar, so we're building that community through a slack, through physical events that we're doing together. 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, because we're connected with many makers, naturally, buyers of businesses want to be connected with us. When you want to sell your business, people naturally come to us, to me, saying, Hey, do you know someone that could be interested? We're also making that connection. I mentioned at the beginning, looking at the entire lifecycle of the customer, we're also looking at the entire lifecycle of your software business, from the launch, scale to exit.
Vova:Because in our ecosystem, in the Bootstrap world, you don't do IPOs. You're most likely going to die or sell. Hopefully, you get to the sell side of things, and we're there to help you also to sell it.
Arvid:Man, there is so much in these three answers. I think there are three really major lessons that I just wanna highlight here again because thank you for sharing this. First one, like, I was talking about how you don't do this kind of horizontal integration, like going off the services or tests or that. You're doing a full vertical integration. That is amazing because that kind of leads to the second one, the alignment.
Arvid:You understand perfectly what a founder needs, what a software entrepreneur is good at and may not be good at. So taking all this and solving it for them in one fully verticalized package, you get the alignment because you understand. Right? Like, if if you were somebody who was just trying to serve the market, you didn't get the personal perspective, you wouldn't do these things because you you would say, oh, they can do this themselves. But you know that they don't like it.
Arvid:You know that they may not even be capable of coming up with the idea of doing it in the first place. So you take that and solve it for them. And then you build a community of people, like, not just on on the business level, but on the the founder quality of life level. That is really cool. That is a very special kind of customer service if you don't just want to help them solve their problem, but you actually want to allow them to have
Vova:a life changing exit. And we also have an affiliate platform as part of Freemius. So we naturally, over the years, build connections with affiliates. So we are also happy to facilitate connections to affiliates. So if there's some YouTuber that's in our network and you have, like, exciting product, we can make that connection.
Vova:We're doing this event called Makers Meetup, where previously it was focused on bringing just software makers, but now we start to bring influencers as well. This is mutually beneficial. They are looking for products to promote, founders are looking for them. We started to grow that program as well, basically creating opportunities. Once you really focus on specific vertical and the entire kind of life cycle of that vertical, opportunities come in.
Vova:We have perks network, people who want to offer their services for that audience so they're willing to offer exclusive discounts. So we have that in the dashboard as well. And we try to focus on solutions that are really relevant to our audience and not just anything out there. So you get a lot, a lot of value, we keep adding more of that. And I can also say that, like you said, that we know how to help them.
Vova:Yes, because we've been through the journey. Right? And this is why we are all it feels that like our audience is pushing us to grow as well, because we're acquiring all this knowledge, experience, and data that we can pass over to help them be more successful in their business.
Arvid:Yeah. You're definitely facilitating growth and growing yourself as a consequence of that. That is amazing. And one thing that really stands out is how you do not shy away from connecting. Like, that's something and you said it.
Arvid:Introvert. Right? Introverts tend to stay at home. You know, we we sit on a couch, 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, 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, as somebody who becomes part of a community or fosters community in the first place.
Arvid:So that is amazing. And it brings me to let's call it my last question. If people wanna 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? Where should they check on Freemius News and News of VOVA?
Vova:Yeah. So we're pretty active on all social networks. I would say mostly on X and LinkedIn, also experimenting with blue sky. For me personally, Vova Feldman, I guess it will be written somewhere in the notes so you can find how to spell that or Freemius. We're also very active on YouTube.
Vova:We constantly push content out there on the blog, we have a podcast called plugin.fm, which brings basically founders that have some unique experience. And we focus on that firsthand experience and trying to kind of distill actionable, you know, things that you can take out of every episode. We had people like Jason Cohen, Matt Bolenweg, Arvid. Mhmm. Of course, talking about the whole building public ecosystem.
Vova:Amazing episode, by the way. Also, feel free to email me. Honestly, I'm available. So it's vulva@freemius.com.
Arvid:You are available, and you're present in the community. I really appreciate that. And thank you for sharing all these insights into Phrimeos and your journey today. I think that is I'm still very inspired by this. I was glad to meet you at the conference, and I'm super happy that you got to share ten years, man.
Arvid:That is a lot of time and a lot of time building something really, really cool. Appreciate it. Thank you so much for coming on the show.
Vova:Thanks for having me. It was really awesome. Appreciate that.
Arvid:And that's it for today. Thank you so much for listening to The Bootstrap Founder. You can find me on Twitter at avid kahl, a r v I d k a h l. And if you wanna 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, and names on podcasts out there. Podscan is a near real time podcast database with a stellar API.
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