The Exchanges

Q I want to double click into marketing because I see a lot of founders struggling to get eyeballs on their products. What are the mistakes that you see people making most when it comes to figuring out marketing?

A Yeah, I think that where a lot of people get lost in marketing is they think, okay, I will just DM influencers and expect a response within 24 hours. They'll DM 10 influencers and they get no responses. They go, oh, this is so hard. And I'm like, no, you're just, you're not getting creative with it. With Riz GPT, the creator is making the most profitable content. Most of them are like 1819 years old. They're just doing it for fun. And so getting in contact with him was really difficult. I would find that one of them had a discord link hidden in their Instagram bio or something. And I would join that discord and I would send a message every 10 minutes until the person responded. There were guys that I was DMing their mom saying, Hey, get me in contact with your son. I want to pay him money.

AI assessment note: “where a lot of people get lost in marketing is they think, okay, I will just DM”

Q about building a profitable side project like Dimitro and hundreds of other founders, just like him head to the first link in the description to learn a bit more about the Academy and see if it's a fit for you. Now let's get back to our interview with Dimitro. Okay. Now we have a working product, but how do we get customers? Which marketing channels work for you the best?

A Okay. Okay. So when I started, it was like, I was trying almost everything. And then I saw, for me, Twitter worked, Google worked. These are currently major channels for me. Then you have a lot of unobvious channels like Zapier, Make. A lot of people are using these tools for their businesses automating, and if you can put your products onto these platforms, you know, people will find you. Also, of course, it was Product Hunt launch. It helped me with the awareness, and it helped me with the boosting my SEO. Some unobvious channel for me, I probably will invest more in it, is YouTube. Somebody posted tutorial how to send cold emails with my product, and I saw, like, paying customer coming from YouTube, and I thought, wow, I can also publish tutorials on YouTube for this kind of technical product, and people still can find me in SEO and Google. It's pretty hard to get to the first position, but for some keywords, Google also shows videos, you know, like YouTube videos, so you can post YouTube video, and you can be around pretty high, you know, it's kind of hack, I would say, you know.

AI assessment note: “Twitter worked, Google worked. These are currently major channels for me.”

Q Awesome. But with all these users coming in, how do you manage customer support or all these customer inquiries?

A So for the first year working on it, I was entirely alone on the project. So I was doing everything myself. I was receiving messages like all the time at night. So sometimes I would forget, you know, to turn off notifications and then it would wake me up. Later on, I hired someone to help me with this, and that was really a relief. But that being said, I really don't regret doing this that way. It really helped me build a better product, understand their user needs, but also identify issues within the product. So even today, we still have the operator, you know, like an agent that's working with me, that's always on it. And we also have an AI chat bot that we train, you know, on all the product docs and all the past conversations and really incentivize people to Talk to us. So within the product, we have tons of button, you know, that they can click to report a bug, leave us some feedback, suggest a feature, or just, you know, like talk to us really. Since the beginning, I've only built what people ask me to build.

AI assessment note: “we still have the operator... And we also have an AI chat bot”

Q Nice. So actively talking to customers is how you actually find the features to add. Let's now talk about monetization. How did you start making money from note forms? How did you make your first dollar?

A Yeah. It's starting taking off slowly. I think at some point at which a thousand users had Tons of feature requests. All of these features that I was adding, I was adding, you know, a little pro tag. And when you clicked on it, it says, Hey, this is free for now because it's the beta, but whenever it will launch, it will become a paid feature. And then one day I built all the subscription system and I just flipped the switch and I told all the users, Hey, now this part of the product is paid. Since you were there since the beginning, here's a 40% discount code that you can use for life. And it was a long day. I remember I was just, you know, like refreshing the Stripe page to try and get a new subscription, but nothing came. And then later during the night, one guy took a yearly subscription even, and I was so happy. Like I made 90 dollars and then the day after maybe I got two and then three, and then I didn't get any subscription for like three days, started to panic. And then I got another one and just went on from there.

AI assessment note: “later during the night, one guy took a yearly subscription even... I made 90 dollars”

Q You mentioned earlier that before getting hit with the paywall, the user is being walked through the onboarding process. What's your experience with that?

A The onboarding is super important because this is an opportunity for you to walk the user through their own problems. So for example, on PuffCount, my onboarding is extensive and I ask the users a lot of questions. And some people say that's annoying. I don't want to do that. I just want to get into the app. But the data has told me that if I walk the users through the onboarding, they commit time and I'm able to walk them through their problem that puff count is solving. So when they hit the paywall, they've thought about their problem a lot. And they're like, wow, I actually really do need to quit, or I really do need this product. And they're much more likely to convert.

AI assessment note: “So when they hit the paywall, they've thought about their problem a lot.”

Q Okay, and what about turning that design into an actual working app? How do you build it with no coding experience?

A You go on to Upwork and you look for a developer. You can price it based on, like, the complexity of your app. For an app like Puff Counts, fairly straightforward. Couple main features. You get that done for less than five grand, right? You can get the MVP out there. I recommend only hiring developers from Eastern Europe. They're going to give you the best quality code for a cheaper price. Once you have your developer that you'd like to go with, you do it on a per project completion basis. So I don't pay anyone per hour. I pay them when the app is complete. It's on the store. There's no bugs, but 100%, you can build an app for less than a thousand dollars. You can go to a website called theme forest and you can download pretty decent starter template for any app out there. And again, you know, just launching an MVP, like, keep it simple. And if your budget is tighter, like, the simpler your app, the better.

AI assessment note: “You go on to Upwork and you look for a developer.”

Q Okay, and what about turning that design into an actual working app? How do you build it with no coding experience?

A You go on to Upwork and you look for a developer. You can price it based on, like, the complexity of your app. For an app like Puff Counts, fairly straightforward. Couple main features. You get that done for less than five grand, right? You can get the MVP out there. I recommend only hiring developers from Eastern Europe. They're going to give you the best quality code for a cheaper price. Once you have your developer that you'd like to go with, you do it on a per project completion basis. So I don't pay anyone per hour. I pay them when the app is complete. It's on the store. There's no bugs, but 100%, you can build an app for less than a thousand dollars. You can go to a website called theme forest and you can download pretty decent starter template for any app out there. And again, you know, just launching an MVP, like, keep it simple. And if your budget is tighter, like, the simpler your app, the better.

AI assessment note: “You go on to Upwork and you look for a developer.”

Q Can you give me a timeline of how you get into coding, how you get into indie hacking?

A I was a big fan of RuneScape when I was a kid. Like, giant RuneScape head. And I remember when I was coming out of college, I started looking at RuneScape again, and I was like, Now I'm a bit older. I'm a bit more mature. I don't want to spend 13 hours a day playing RuneScape anymore, and I kind of like the idea of coding. I, I know that's something, it's an important skill, so I'm like, let me figure out how to make a bot to do some gold farming in RuneScape. I started Harvard's, like, CS, 50 class, watched a bunch of YouTube tutorials, started building for my, for myself. Like, so, for example, I built a website for myself, and I built, like, a blackjack game. Took a few years to, you know, learn how to code, that kind of thing, and built stealth GPT.

AI assessment note: “I started Harvard's, like, CS, 50 class... and built stealth GPT.”

Q Alright, let's talk about failure for a second. So, I know that in your journey, you had something that kind of really set you back. Can you tell me a little bit more about that?

A I was 23 years old. I started my first company, J Squared Invest. And I started because I was getting involved with, like, crypto and stuff like that. I saw there was, like, a huge market need for people who didn't understand how to get into Bitcoin or Ethereum. They didn't know what Coinbase was. They didn't know how to open up a wallet. So, I just saw an opportunity like any other entrepreneur. I'm an entrepreneur. I had no money. So I brought, I made, I got a loan from my father, got the lawyers, got the company ready, all that kind of stuff. And we just started taking in clients. 20 17 markets were great, very bullish. Everything went to the moon until 2018 came around and, um, pretty much I lost all my money. Um, I had a lot of money in the crypto markets. Of course the company got rinsed. And then a few months later, I get hit with this email out of nowhere from the CFTC. I guess there was like some like accusations of like, oh, I Took client money or stuff like that. Every time I got an email from these people, it was like, It was devastating. It was devastating to get an email from them, but it was also devastating every day thinking like, are they going to do something today? Are they going to email me today? Are they going to who knows what? Cause you're at their full mercy. You're at the full mercy of the government. Um, at that point and you got really nothing. We l…

AI assessment note: “pretty much I lost all my money. Um, I had a lot of money”

Q So you got this product, it's pretty much validated, and now you're trying to scale it. How do you actually scale a business like this?

A Yeah. We kind of went at it with like a UCG type strategy on like TikTok and Instagram talking about like the service and just kind of letting people know at that point it was like market education because something like this has never existed before. We needed to tell people like, Hey, what is StealthGPT? What does it do? Just kind of intrigued them into it. So a lot of focus on just explaining what the product is and why people need a product like StealthGPT. When we got past the summer, We started leaning a lot into Google ads and really investigating Google ads and just found a tremendous amount of success through that channel. They were converting like insanely low cost per conversion, 10 dollars, 15 dollars, 20 dollars in the early days, and that allowed us to scale a ton. So we would get a lot of money in and then we just pour more into Google ads and it was just like putting gasoline on a fire just kind of kept going and going and going.

AI assessment note: “We started leaning a lot into Google ads... and that allowed us to scale a ton.”

Q Yeah. Coming off that, how do you find this idea for StealthGPT? How do you come up with the idea?

A Twenty-twenty-two rolls around, and ChatGPT is like a thing, and I was like, okay, this is gonna dominate online content. People are gonna produce all this content with AI, and they're gonna put it online. Naturally, there's gonna be some kind of pushback. There's gonna be people who care. Is the content that I'm reading right now human or is it AI? And TikTok, because it, I guess, spies on the neural nets of your brain or something like that, just knew I was thinking about this and served me up a video in my timeline. It's like, hey, there's this AI detector called GPT-zero. They're able to scan with like a 99% accuracy. Is this content AI generate or not? So I started going to work just Reverse engineering it, really trying to figure out can I consistently beat this AI detector and keep making it say that this is human generated. After a few days of like trialing it, I cracked it. Like eventually it just, every single response I was thrown through the AI detector was coming up human. And I was like, okay, we got something here. And so around January is like when I first had the idea for stealth GPT after seeing that TikTok video. And then in February I bought the domain stealthgpt.ai for 75 bucks a year, and they make you buy two years minimum, so it's a 150 dollars. By March, we had our first, ah, real website with Next.js and React live, and we got our first customers in Ma…

AI assessment note: “around January is like when I first had the idea for stealth GPT”

Q You run this pretty big B to B SaaS business. Now it started small, but now there's 40 people on the team. How are you able to hire 40 people and keep this profitable?

A Yeah, so when people hear Forgy team members, they're thinking full-time US employees that are getting anywhere from 50 to a 100,000 dollars a year, right? For us, that would not be sustainable by any means. And so, a majority of our team are either developers that are in countries like the Ukraine, or customer success representatives that are in countries like Lebanon. They're the hardest workers I've ever come across. They're really good at speaking English compared to some other VAs, and it's cheap labor. You're paying anywhere from a thousand to 2000 dollars a month to get someone full time from Lebanon who's as good as, or better in my opinion, than someone in the U.S. that you might have to pay anywhere from five to 8000 dollars a month.

AI assessment note: “a majority of our team are either developers that are in countries like the Ukraine”

Q You build this amazing SaaS business, but what's the timeline here? How do you get there?

A So I hit entrepreneurship as early as I possibly could around the age of 16 or 17. And just like anyone else getting started with entrepreneurship and no money, you go with the service rep. And I built an agency business around that. We were primarily doing lead generation services for a really long time. That was myself, my cousin, Dan, who's still a co-founder at the businesses we run now, and Christian, who's also a co-founder and list kit and everything else we do. And we grew that business to a hundred K a month to us. That was a massive success. But the problem we ran into is we couldn't scale it really past that. And that's when we partnered up with Cold Email Wizard or Daniel Fazio, as everyone knows, and started Client Ascension. That helped people do the same things we did to go from zero to a 100,000 dollars a month with our agency by using cold email lead generation tactics that we used.

AI assessment note: “I hit entrepreneurship as early as I possibly could around the age of 16”

Q Let's talk about ads. You guys run ads. How does that look?

A So the problem with ads and running a sales team for SaaS is again, you're selling something that's low ticket. So what we did is we realized that people signing up for ListKit, not all of them knew how to use it properly. And so we came up with a setup offer where we would come into your business, set up a cold email system the same way we've set up our own system and give you the leads on a reoccurring basis. But the thing with ads is the creatives don't last very long as you start to scale. Like once you get past 304 hundred dollars a day in spend, you really have to create new creatives. And so it's a mix of videos speaking direct to camera, talking about how this software can help with your cold email campaigns or it can help you generate more leads. But a lot of them are just static images as well. So we're testing almost 20 new creatives every week. 10 different static images, 10 different variations of videos with different headlines, different copy, different people in the videos, right? So we're always testing.

AI assessment note: “we're testing almost 20 new creatives every week. 10 different static images”

Q So we talked about competition. How do you not only build something as good as a competition, but beat the competition?

A One of the things that we do really well at Listkid is Every single customer that purchases list kit, we offer them to get on a one-on-one onboarding call. When I talk to a customer, I simply ask, why did you sign up for this? What were you hoping to use this to achieve? And are they getting that or are they not getting that? And if they're not getting that, figure out what you can build either on the product side or what you can do better on the customer support side to make sure that they get that not just one time, but consistently over time, right? Because SaaS is a game of Keeping churn low. So we're always talking to our customers. I think more than any other SaaS company out there by offering to get on a one-on-one call with them right in the beginning. And that's how we stay ahead of the competitors.

AI assessment note: “we're always talking to our customers... And that's how we stay ahead of the competitors.”

Q Tell me a little bit about your backstory and how do you get into entrepreneurship?

A So my backstory, you could trace back to when I was pretty young. I had a handful of obsessions, luckily hit an athletic streak, which allowed me to play football in college at Princeton, studied math and computer science there. And then, as a sophomore, I got an internship at BlackRock. I was like, wow, this is the coolest thing ever. This is a dream job. I'm gonna go work for a hedge fund. That led to taking that full-time job when I graduated. I was checking every single box. I got good grades. On track to be 22 years old, making a 180 grand in New York City. I'm like, I did everything right. Amazing. 18 months later, I was doing well at the job, but if I showed up at five a.m. and worked till eight p.m., I might make 10% more money, but if I worked as little as Possible. I would make the same amount, and that kind of messed with me because I couldn't apply the level of effort that I wanted to because my incentives weren't there. If I wanted to work harder, if I wanted to bring more intensity, nothing would happen, and that was a freak out moment where I said, time to go find something I could do that with.

AI assessment note: “that was a freak out moment where I said, time to go find something”

Q What's your advice for becoming a good writer and a great writer?

A So I can help with becoming a good writer because that's all I consider myself, but the best writer I know is Nicholas Cole, who's my business partner. He wrote a book called The Art and Business of Online Writing, which is the first book I read on writing on the internet. I think it's the number one book Any person should read who's interested in writing on any kind of social platform. It's going to give you a full crash course of everything you need to know. So that'd be my first piece of advice is after this video, go on Amazon, check that book out. And then my second piece of advice would be always zoom out from the lens of it doesn't matter who you are, how much time you spend on it. The reader does not care about any of that. They care about what the writing can do for them. And if you write with that, what we call an empathetic lens, putting yourself in the reader's shoes and say, how can I create something that they're going to Stumble into with a problem. I'm going to solve their problem and I'm going to solve it as quickly as two minutes by the end of this Twitter thread or tweet or long form. It's really just solving people's problems and figuring out how you can do that in the most concise, clear, compelling way.

AI assessment note: “my first piece of advice is... And then my second piece of advice would be”

Q So, now you got a little bit of popularity on Twitter. How do you actually turn this into something that makes money?

A The viral post was a breakdown of Balogy. The result of that was people who wanted me to write a thread on them were now reaching out to me saying, hey, I really like these worldview creation threads that you've been putting together. Would you be willing to do one for me? And I had someone reach out to me. He approached me, said, would you do this for me? I said, sure. He goes, okay, how much should I pay you? And here I am. I have no clue. I don't want to say something because I've been doing this for free. I don't want to say something that would get him to say no. So I'm like, look, I don't know what to say. I don't know what to charge. How about this? I'll go do this for you. You just let me know how valuable it is at the end of this, and you pay me that much. He's like, sure, great. Go for it. I was going to ask for 250 dollars, but again, I didn't ever say that. So I spent the weekend, Saturday, Sunday, just immersing myself, 15 hours, all the way down the rabbit hole, and I put together a really great product form. Emails me back, like, two days later, he's like, dude, this is amazing. Thank you so much. I can't wait to use all this. Can't wait to tell my friends, like, hey, you could go do this for them. Putting you in touch with my assistant, who will help coordinate payment. So his assistant emails me and says, hey, where can I pay you? I spun up a PayPal, sent her t…

AI assessment note: “people who wanted me to write a thread on them were now reaching out”

Q So you're building this thing, you're making money. How do you grow it? How do you grow into a business that's making a million a year?

A It's the same exact thing I've been doing since day one. It's just content. Put out as much content as I possibly can create. We start with the video, the long form video, the script. We take that, we rerecord little bits for short form. So I do one long form video a week. Three short form videos a week on YouTube, Instagram, Tik Tok, Pinterest, Twitter, LinkedIn, anybody that will take a short form video basically. And then we take those scripts and format them and turn them into blog posts that rank on Google. Anybody that comes to us from there, hopefully signs up for our email list. And then we have an entire email newsletter where we send two to three emails a week to those people. And we run ads as well, which helps supplement all of that. But the same video that dominates Every single year. It's a PowerPoint. There's no script. I just, you know, developed this, like, here's what I, how I think about pool care from start to finish. We can't beat it. What that tells me is it doesn't matter how good your video is. It just matters that the content is good.

AI assessment note: “It's just content. Put out as much content as I possibly can create.”

Q You run this business. It's a family business. Can you tell me a little bit more about that?

A Yeah. There was a moment where I was working with Steph, my wife, thinking about hiring more and more people, but I was like, let me see if my brother wants to do it. He was like, yeah, I don't want to do that. I was like, oh, okay, cool. Um, you're hired. And so I thought, let me use this business that I have this asset to take care of everybody. So my wife, she writes long form scripts for YouTube. She also writes all of the short form content. She also edits And publishes the long form content on YouTube. My brother does short form edits and he does all of our customer service. And then I do literally everything else. So I read the scripts and into, into camera, do email marketing podcasts. I do articles. So all the stuff that with the website, any technical things that need to be taken care of, any admin things that need to be taken care of pretty much. Yeah. Fill in all the gaps of like running a business. I do all of it. And we all Get paid the same so that nobody feels superior over. I don't feel like a boss. No one feels like a boss. I don't, you know, need to make more than everybody else just because I own the company. I want everyone to be taken care of. That's the point. It's kind of a rising tide lifts all boats scenario.

AI assessment note: “my wife, she writes long form scripts... My brother does short form edits”

Q Give me a little bit more of a breakdown about how you built it. So you had your first client, then, then what did you do from there?

A We generated and still generate a lot of our leads through SEO. It was one keyword in particular that I write for. It was just drug rehab marketing. And then we started writing for drug rehab, SEO, drug rehab lead generation. So if there's like one message that somebody can get from me, it's that you don't have to build this giant media entity. Like you can tackle it one keyword, one article at a time. The trick is to be methodical about it. That's why I hate the advice, like, just make great stuff. Just be yourself. It's just being yourself is like terrible SEO advice. What you want to do is you want to know what people are searching for. You can figure that out just by going to trends.google.com, type in a bunch of keywords, see what keywords are available, and then write an article that best solves the particular problem that that person has. I always think of Google as a Problem solving machine. You never go to Google for anything else other than to solve a problem. And so if you can write an article that best solves that person's problem, you can generate leads. And then all of a sudden you can build a business.

AI assessment note: “We generated and still generate a lot of our leads through SEO.”

Q Can you give me a timeline of how you got started and how you got into the business of entrepreneurship?

A I grew up a blue collar kid. I built houses for most of my childhood. My dad Worked at the airport, and my mom was a nurse, and so I just thought I'd be working my whole life. Got in trouble a lot when I was younger, and I had a bit of a drug problem, so the time came when I needed to change my life, and I went to rehab, and I got sober. About six months into that journey, a friend, basically a mentor, bought me a subscription to Success Magazine, which had this CD in it, and it was this interview, and it was this guy named Seth Godin. He said, start a blog, don't tell anybody about it, and write in it every day. And there was something about that message where I thought like, you know what? I can do that. I don't know why it felt like it was a good direction for me, but I just, I knew I could do that. So I started a blog spot and I would just write random articles about like my day and what I was feeling and the experiences I had. And there was other people that might've been getting sober or might've been going through a journey of themselves. And they were saying like, oh, I really relate to this. Or like, I felt the same way, but I was wondering how are these people finding my blog? Like, I didn't tell anybody about it, so I started researching, and I discovered SEO, I discovered search, and then I would read Copyblogger every day and just improve my skills of, of being an …

AI assessment note: “eventually that Blogspot account turned into Sober Nation, and, and that's how I got my start.”

Q Let's talk about sales and closing deals. Do you have any tips on negotiation and how to close a deal?

A There's only a couple of things you need to know about closing deals. One is learn how to ask questions so that the person tells you Their pain points. You want the person to tell you their problems. When that's happening, I just write down what the person says. I write down the problem and I respond with a solution to that problem. The second most important thing is to get like the, the price out of the way in the very beginning. Because what always happens, you go through this whole pitch and then people say, okay, I'll call you back. Let me think about it. And that's the worst thing that can happen. So I would start a conversation by saying like, hey, look, just do me a favor and let me know If you're serious about this, that way you get like a commitment and you actually get the deal closed. And then the last and absolutely most important thing is ask for the deal. Here's my line for this is the best line. It's, are you ready to get started? So you got to say, you say, are you ready to get started? And the trick is you shut up. And so what I do is I say, are you ready to get started? And then I mute my phone and I put it in front of me and I just sit there and that's when you close the deal.

AI assessment note: “There's only a couple of things you need to know about closing deals.”

Q So from what I understand, you have no experience coding. How did you build and launch something like this?

A I'm not a coder by any means. If I see it, I kind of know, okay, that's JavaScript. That's HTML. And I knew for what I wanted to build as an MVP, it would take a pretty significant time to build it with code. And I, at that time, wasn't making any money. I didn't want to hire anyone because I just had an idea. And so that's where I was really exposed to, uh, the, the no code industry. I was exposed to bubble.io. That was really The only application that I really dove into to, to build, because it was the most well-known, and based on the research that I had done, that the easiest of all the no-code solutions. The first place I went was the Bubble official website for just kind of reading some documentation, but there's so much documentation out there, which is a good thing. Kind of where I got hung up was very isolated issues that I was trying to solve, but that's really where YouTube University came in. There are some awesome Bubble developers out there that Produce such high quality content on YouTube, and it's all free. At that time, the whole app was in bubble. It was a hundred percent no code. Probably up until maybe four or five months ago, it went from a hundred percent no code to now it's about, I would say, like five or 10%. As you get more experience with no code, you start to understand some of the limitations. There's not a lot, but there are some limitations.

AI assessment note: “I was exposed to bubble.io. That was really The only application that I really dove into”

Q founders, head to the first link in the description, and we're going to give you 52 micro SaaS ideas, just like David's, so you can get started on your journey. Much love. Enjoy the rest of the video. Peace. All right, so you have this MVP that you built from scratch. How do you get your first customer, and how do you get a ton of people to use it?

A The first people I told were the people that were at my full-time job at that time, and they're like, oh my god, this is amazing. They thought it took me months to build this thing. It really took me just a Couple of weeks. And that really kind of speaks to the power of no code. Um, I guess if you were to code it, it didn't take much longer. And so my next step was I need to tell more people about this tool. And so naturally the next place I liked was Reddit. Went to the Excel subreddit, where there's probably several hundred people that follow it. Reddit title was AI Excel formula generator. And I think I mentioned it was free and it was just a title and the description was just the link minutes later. It was like the top post of the day, turned into the top post of the week. It blew up as much as, like, something can blow up within the Excel community. A couple of days after that, someone in the comment section said, you should post this on the Internet is Beautiful subreddit, and so I posted it there. That was like the thing that put the app over the edge and made it go viral for months, and so I had posted it there. It got some 10,000 upvotes, Thousands of comments. You know, I got thousands and thousands of people visiting the site, using the app.

AI assessment note: “Went to the Excel subreddit... someone in the comment section said, you should post this”

Q Something changed in the last few years where now this opportunity is possible. Can you tell me a little bit more about that?

A Yeah. You've now seen a number of companies That help individuals set up these SPVs. So you've got players like AngelList, like Sidecar, like Carta, enabling individuals like me, who have zero AUM, nobody's invested in my fund, to go out there and identify a great founder or a great company to invest in. I can set up this SPV, I can reach out to friends, friends of friends, those who are accredited investors, to participate in that deal and invest through my vehicle. Backing syndicates is kind of a unique way for these everyday investors to access This venture capital asset class where you need to actually have a relationship with the founder, the CEO, the company, and at the right time of when they're actually raising around. So most of these folks, while interested in venture capital, they don't know the founders. They don't know the timing to be talking to the founders. We take care of all of that by securing these allocations, knowing the timing, knowing the right companies and provide them an avenue to participate in these deals. Unlike the public markets where you can simply research buy and trade as you see fit. So it's a really nice way to bundle these checks. Democratize access to a lot of these startups. And I think, yeah, over the past five years, we've seen significant growth there. And a lot of these platforms have played a kind of meaningful role in that as well.

AI assessment note: “You've now seen a number of companies That help individuals set up these SPVs.”

Q 270 companies invested in, how do you find all these deals?

A Really there's Five different ways that we typically source deals and access founders. The first is co-syndicating with other syndicate leads like myself, right? A lot of times there will be other syndicates that maybe have a larger allocation than they can fill, and they'll reach out to us, um, to kind of co-syndicate the deal, team up, and put the deal together. A second way is relationships with other venture capital funds. Early on in my day, I spent a lot of Time building this steel flow hustle guy brand for myself. And I shared a bunch of deals with a lot of different VCs today. I've been able to access some deals alongside them when they might be leading the round or they might be setting the terms. Another way that we access deals is through our portfolio founders. So as we've built relationships with the founders that we've invested in and been helpful or been easy to work with and become friendly or whatever it may be, They're now referring a lot of their founder friends to us, which has been a great way to access founders early on and really in a positive light from an existing portfolio founder. Another way that we access deals is through other angel investors who invest very early stage and, you know, they're not going to be competitive with us or a bigger venture capital fund. They always take a small sliver of the round itself. And so when I can build good relati…

AI assessment note: “Really there's Five different ways that we typically source deals and access founders.”

Q You mentioned product market fit. How do you determine that, and how do you know when you've reached product market fit?

A It depends on the business that you're in. For Storyarb, I think of product market fit in two ways. One, as a percentage of, of our current clients, what percentage of our clients would recommend Storyarb to the people in their network, where their reputation is on the line, and I want that number to be at least 50%. The other number that I'm focused on is retention. Because again, I think the easiest part of this business Is getting customers. I think the hardest part of this business is keeping customers. And I've heard historically for ghostwriting agencies that when I talk to people who own ghostwriting agencies, they retain their average customer for like three to five months. That is like a scary short period of time. And so our goal is when we hit true product market fit, our average customer will have worked with us for on average, 10 months. And so those are the metrics we're focused on to hit that point. Where we feel like we can now scale our customer base now because clearly we're providing something that's super valuable to people.

AI assessment note: “For Storyarb, I think of product market fit in two ways.”

Q I know building a licensing business can be complicated. Are there any really scary moments while building this business or any big obstacles that you had to get through to, to get where you are today?

A Yeah, actually, um, when I went first went full time with the business in 2016, you know, moved all my stuff down to Los Angeles where my two other business partners were. One of my co-founders were there. Um, you know, we're, we're three months in and, uh, things are going great. You know, sales are picking up. We're seeing a lot of growth, working a lot of hours, but having a lot of fun, working in our living room, um, at this one middle desk in a really small apartment in L.A., just really working and grinding away, but, you know, about a month, about four months in, in April, we get a notice from one of the licensing organizations saying, hey, you're not paying royalties, and we're finding out that there's all these sales that you're basically not reporting on, and we're like, what are you talking about? And so we started looking into it and ended up finding out, oh wait, licensing's the whole thing. We have to get approved. We have to pay royalties. And so we basically got audited and long, long story short, um, we had a 40,000 dollar bill four months into it, which, you know, at the time, you know, we were doing just under a million in sales and that was really scary, right? That's like four percent of our costs. And we didn't even have 40 K in the bank to roll with. And so, you know, we went back to the licensing agency and said, hey, you know, we want to be in this indu…

AI assessment note: “we had a 40,000 dollar bill four months into it... that was really scary”

Q Tell me how this all started. Did you have a software background? How did you get to this point where you had a three million dollar per year SaaS with one founder, one employee?

A So I started non-technical just like Hacking away at the original product, which was V one. That was like a no code app builder that ran slow as shit. And then because I was able to monetize that like early in 2019, I was able to hire my first employee. We kind of rebuilt the thing and we launched that in 2020. We got that to seven figures in revenue. And then 2021, we kind of took like a step back because we, we were thinking, what is the bigger opportunity here? And the sentiment with like customers was how do we automate those things? We thought, okay, let's listen to this automation thing. Maybe we can get on the forefront there. And we kind of started with just like a few hundred grand in like 20, 21 of that revenue and then made it to about three million in three years.

AI assessment note: “I started non-technical just like Hacking away at the original product”