The Exchanges

Q social friendly website with scheduling payments, messaging, and more built right in. The proof is in the profits. Coaches like you have earned, collectively earned over forty-seven million dollars using Paperbell. Forty-seven million dollars, that's That's a lot of money, actually, because coaches, I know it's a dicey, I guess I view it maybe as there's a lot of prosumers and hobbyists doing coaching. Is that, you think that's accurate?

A That is accurate. A lot of people do it because it's something you can sort of just do for a few hours on the side. So yeah, a lot of people do it on the side. Um, as you can guess, our best customer is someone who does it full-time as their career. So there's plenty of those out there, but yeah, it's a very prosumery type of business. I liked hearing that headline reflected back and I was like, okay, I think that actually does sum it up pretty well. Um, and yeah, just to clarify on the forty seven million, you know, that's not our revenue. People connect their Stripe account and their PayPal account and then do their payments through Paperbell. So that's just flowing through us. We don't take any kind of, um, cut on that, which is a benefit to our customers. So yeah, we're just a true self-serve SaaS business, 57 dollars a month.

AI assessment note: “That is accurate. A lot of people do it because it's something you can”

Q And, and they like set the stage there. So you launched in 2020, When did they launch, and were they, like, were they funded by the time you heard about them, and how much, you know, did they raise?

A So they also launched in 20, 20 and their founder is actually someone that I did know from years ago when he was more in the course space also. Um, but we hadn't spoken in like 10 plus year, you know, we both apparently just had the same idea at the same time. I don't think that's a huge surprise because like I said, it was a growing market and there wasn't someone who had really completely addressed it really well. So practice launched the same year as us, 20, 20. Um, and they announced that they had raised, uh, ten million when they launched, I think they might have called it a seed round. So the founder in his previous business had raised like a hundred million. So he's someone, you know, who's used to those larger numbers. So this is my assumption. I would assume that he thought he would go on to raise more, which they did not end up doing.

AI assessment note: “they also launched in 20, 20... they announced that they had raised, uh, ten million”

Q Yeah, I like that. The virtual assistant thing, if you want to read more about that, Buy Back Your Time by Dan Martell, I think was a really good book talking about how to think through that. Where do you hire? Are you an Upwork person? Where would you look for someone like this?

A Yeah. Good question. So I have a virtual assistant type of person I have found before on platforms like Upwork or Fiverr. If you look for the more expensive people on those platforms, especially like Fiverr, if you're looking at like the most expensive person on Fiverr, that can be a good way to do it. And especially if you have some kind of like specialty that you're starting with, like, let's say you do a lot of video editing. You're like, okay, I'm going to look for someone Who has that skill listed on those sites, and then they can do other VA stuff for me. For customer service, I would probably look more towards, like, a lot of it is regional, so, um, if you're looking in the Philippines, onlinejobs.ph, like oldie but a goodie, still kicking.

AI assessment note: “I have found before on platforms like Upwork or Fiverr.”

Q tools to schedule, track sessions, manage clients in real-time, automatically. Exactly. And then the 20, 25, the last homepage before they shut down, the appointment platform built for growth. I mean, that's almost a completely different category. It is. Empower your team with the scalable tools to track, manage, and grow bottom line. Were you looking at these headlines over the years, or did you just look at them retroactively?

A Um, it was interesting looking at them retroactively for this podcast because I, I kind of popped in over the years, but I'm definitely someone who is more, you know, have some awareness of what your competitors are doing, but I'm, I'm more kind of focused on my own thing, but they were always the one I was most interested in because it was, they launched in the same year as us and raised. Ten million, you know, where none of our other competitors had. So I was certainly worried about them taking a lot of the market, but also it was also along the way, this kind of parallel journey, because We've launched at the same time. So I did notice that one year in the middle, when they started to go more, just sort of general client business and, and small business, I actually thought at that point, I'm like, oh, this is kind of, that makes sense to me. I think they saw that this was not a big enough market for the amount they've raised. I think they're going to go broader, but then they seem to move from there to like, I think those later headlines are trying to serve again, those like multi-coach practices is kind of my, my best guess. And again, this is where like VC world can be so different from bootstrapper world. Just speculating maybe when they tried to go after that general client business, maybe they felt like, oh, we need to raise another fifty million to go after this really…

AI assessment note: “interesting looking at them retroactively for this podcast because I, I kind of popped in over the years”

Q Yeah, that makes sense. And so you had a conversation about potentially acquiring it. How did that come about? Did they reach out to you? Did he reach out to you? I guess you kind of knew him.

A Yeah. So at one point he had sent me any, because like I said, we, we kind of knew each other. So he had sent me an email at one point over the years being like, Hey, do you want to chat? And we didn't end up chatting, but you know, it was friendly and fine. And then we actually heard they were closing from customers because we started getting emails saying like, oh, we need all of a sudden we need to move our coaching business somewhere. You know, how do you guys compare to practice? Can we move over that kind of stuff? But there was no public info on social media, on their blog, on their website. So we actually asked one of those. People who had contacted us were like, can you forward us the email that you got? Um, because there was nothing public. And then we were actually able to jump on that and publish a blog post about practice closing because they had told their customers, but there was no public info. So people were searching for it, but there wasn't a lot out there. So I then tried to reach out to their founder to find out, uh, what was happening. It took me a little while, a few layers to get to them. But I did end up speaking to him, but I think the thing about SAS is that like, if you're acquiring another business, you either have to keep that business running, right. And like keep their whole business and keep their customers. Or you have to tell their customers, …

AI assessment note: “I then tried to reach out to their founder to find out, uh, what was happening.”

Q So that's then the question is, should you be creating Pinterest? Well, of course, because you know where your customers are. So that's the, that's the question I would throw back to Daniel, is figure out where your customers are. Are they on xTwitter? Are they on Instagram? Are they on YouTube? That's how I think about it.

A And I would say, like, keep it obvious. I think people often overthink this and over engineer this. Like our customers are on Instagram is the main place because Instagram has a massive user base, you know, like don't try to get cute and clever with these little like niche. I mean, sometimes there's a niche community that's super relevant to you, right? If you're like only for Ruby on Rails developers, like, yes, be in those forums and lists and whatever, but like, don't market on blue sky. It just launched. You know, like, hang out there for fun if you want to. Like, mark it on LinkedIn, on Instagram, on Reddit if that's where people are, YouTube, lots of people on YouTube. Like, just don't overthink it. Go for the most obvious ones where your customers obviously are.

AI assessment note: “Go for the most obvious ones where your customers obviously are.”