The Exchanges

Q Interesting. Okay. So that's the main focus. Now, what are you charging for this? When people sign up, what do they pay?

A Well, on the core product, when you just go to our site, it's like four bucks a month. It's a cheap, very low cost product, um, high volume thing. Um, and then on the API, we're kind of still in beta, you know, we've got like a handful of customers using it and we're charging on a per markup basis. So if they have a thousand customers and five of them use it and the rest don't, they only pay for a total number of markups. It's kind of how we're pricing it. Um, you know, so it could be, you know, Couple hundred bucks for them a month to handle their whole client base, depending on how heavily it's used, but we're still trying to figure out what's the best, best pricing model. We're just trying to get some really good companies that have users that find it valuable.

AI assessment note: “on the core product, when you just go to our site, it's like four bucks a month.”

Q plural founderpath.com forward slash products forward slash valuations. So tell me about that, right? I mean, there's a lot of people trying to get to 44,000 bucks in MRR, but they're like six people on their content team. They've gone through eight SEO agencies, like your one man show doing sort of all that. So like, what's the one thing you're doing on the SEO side that's working right now?

A Um, I guess the, the two big things are consistency, you know, like I, I produce content every single week and then, uh, distribution of that content, you know, whether it's through backlinking, uh, outreach or guest posting or just, you know, reposting and doing content elsewhere, but just really a lot of, you know, hustling on that front. And, you know, once you, I found that once you get your domain authority up to a certain point, you start getting inbounds, people asking you to basically help them. And so that's my feed. I basically, when someone hits me up, like, Hey, I want to write a guest post for you. I'm like, okay, here's the topics that I'm writing, like pick one, you know? And like, I, they don't even get to suggest, I already know what I'm going to write in my content calendar. I'm like, write this. And then in return, you need to get me two backlinks on, you know, uh, other guest posts you're writing on other sites before I post this. And that, That's been a consistent flow once we get to a certain point.

AI assessment note: “the two big things are consistency... and then distribution of that content”

Q right? They're on the top of all the big blog posts. They dominate the SEO, blah, blah, blah. Cause they're basically feature parody on everything else. Like what, why do this? I mean, By the way, we're trying to quantify, obviously, the exit, right? Velocity, I think you guys raised about twenty million bucks or something, and you sold for one 80, and there were, what, three or four co-founders?

A Yeah. Three co-founders. It was a slim cap table, like really nice exit for everybody. Um, you know, to answer your question, uh, I think it was a combination of one. I just didn't feel like there was one product that had everything. There was multiple products that I used back and forth to accommodate different needs. So that was one issue. I felt like there was a, there was room for improvement. And two, um, you know, I, I wasn't at the time necessarily looking to have another Billion dollar exit or huge exit like that. You know, I really wanted to build stuff that I liked that I used personally. And I had a team of guys that I met at a consulting company that we're just looking for something fun to work on. And we kind of toyed around with some ideas and we were like, Hey, we can, we can put something together. It's really nice and maybe make a great lifestyle business out of it. And I tell that to founders all the time. It's like, Hey, raising That's a lot. You know, it's like, there's nothing wrong with a business that's throwing off three million dollars in EBITDA with three guys. You know, that's, that's a nice business. So I was like, I think we can build that.

AI assessment note: “I just didn't feel like there was one product that had everything.”

Q you're sort of confirming that was around the right range. Most people don't run that math, right? And they don't realize that it's effectively the same as if you bootstrapped a business to two million that was spitting off a million in free cash flow every year, right? And did it for 14 years. It's the exact same thing, net, net, but probably way less stress. No board meetings, right?

A Dude, board meetings are a nightmare for sure. Yeah. It was a lot of stress. I mean, I was on my baby moon with my wife at that time and we were out of cash. It was 2008. We were going to go under, like we were, we were entirely mortgage at that company and we cycled through a hundred percent of our clients. They all went belly up. And I was like, I'll do, I'm going to shut this company down. I was in Hawaii talking to our investor and he was like, okay, fine, fine. We'll give you a little bit more money. And we had to do, you know, a little, uh, bump raise at a flat valve just to stay afloat. Unfortunately, we were able to like really turn it around, but man, it was, it was rough for a number of years back then.

AI assessment note: “Dude, board meetings are a nightmare for sure. Yeah. It was a lot of stress.”

Q Interesting. Okay. So, so what percent of your content these days would you say you're writing versus this machine is pumping for you?

A Well, I'd say probably. They write at these third parties. Now I reject a lot and I've gotten really good at filtering out who I think is going to be a good writer. So I get at least six to seven inquiries a day in inbound increase. And a lot of them are, are overseas, you know, content creators. I just ignore, but sometimes I'll get, you know, uh, uh, an agency on behalf of another SAS company. That's gold. Like if monday.com has their agency reach out to me, like I'm going to do that deal. You know, that'd be, that's a great partner for me. So, um, and I get, and a lot of those SaaS companies are doing that. Um, so usually I get like three or four a week that are pretty solid that I know will give me good content and are also getting distribution on other sites. So I'll get some good backlinks from it. Um, but it takes some filtering. Um, and then in terms of writing myself, I'll probably write one complete article myself, uh, a month, maybe two. And then I've basically built out this model where I have these third parties, uh, writers create the first draft. And then I spend about an hour and a half editing. I found that to be the most cost effective. So I'll pay like a 150 bucks for a draft and it's good, but not great, but good enough, you know, to get me started, they have a lot of the data in there and then I just reformat it, you know, tailor it and post it. And so it t…

AI assessment note: “in terms of writing myself, I'll probably write one complete article myself, uh, a month”

Q Ah, I see. Did you split equity that way too?

A Sort of. I had a little more experience. So it's a little bit way to my side, but you know, these guys, these guys are, are awesome. And, and it's been a great, we've just had a great team. Like I have a developer. I've worked with some developers over the years. This guy is phenomenal. He can do anything like, can you do this? He's like, yeah, I'll figure out how to do that. And then great front end UX, UI, uh, product guy. And then myself, and I just do all the, all the content marketing, just, you know, SEO, all that stuff. Um, all the BD and, and we just built, and it's just a fun project.

AI assessment note: “Sort of. I had a little more experience. So it's a little bit way”

Q You have to know your audience. So, okay, cool. And is that 10 screenshot per month limit a more powerful upsell driver than if I scroll further down the page and you have these product-based upselling, like blurring, insert imaging, add signatures, et cetera?

A The blurring is important. Yeah. Blurring comes in, comes in heavy. Basically any of these things you try to do, it prompts you right after, um, the signature is a newer feature. That's been a thing. The biggest thing we're working on right now, uh, which we don't have, which is kind of, you know, keeping us, I know we're losing customers for is we don't have a commenting control and we don't have, we've come up with this really clever way to do collaborative stuff. Like there are products out there like Mira and that are like fully real-time collaboration on the annotation side. Um, We don't want to go there. What we want to do is create like, uh, uh, what we're calling layers or sort of like, um, you do your annotations and then you share it with someone else and then they can do it on top and you can like hide or show kind of like Photoshop layers or figment layers. So that way it's not real time, but you don't really need real time. Just need to tell me your comments and then send it to this guy. Give me his comments and then send it to that girl and then give me her comments. And so it like keeps a layer of all these comments and stuff. So that piece is missing and we get a lot of feedback on that. So I think that'll really help. Push it. That'll be a premium feature for sure.

AI assessment note: “The blurring is important. Yeah. Blurring comes in, comes in heavy.”