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Cody McLain

Founder & Executive Chairman, SupportNinja · 1 appearance on the record.

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founderexecutiveauthor@CodyMcLain ↗LinkedIn ↗codymclain.com ↗

Cody McLain is the founder and Executive Chairman of SupportNinja, a global outsourcing firm providing backend and customer support services. He began building web hosting companies at age 15 and is the author of From Foster Care to Millionaire.

17statements → 13claims → 0claims resolved → 3.9/5average certainty → 1.4/5average debate potential → ≈4.0/5argument clarity, estimated → 5said about them ↓

12 not checkable as stated how the 13 claims stand · each chip opens the sources

13 assertions · 3 insights · 1 disclosure · every statement was checked. The predictions and assertions are the 13 claims: statements the public record can support or contradict. 1 is resolved, and 12 name no date, number or outcome precise enough to check. Everything else (opinions, insights, what ifs, disclosures) can never be settled by the record, so it carries no assessment.

The record, in short

What the tape says about how Cody argues and how the claims held up. Everything they said, and everything said about them, is in the tabs below.

Their most notable supported claim

Assertion Supported
A top expense app's 'smart scanning' was secretly powered by offshore humans
“Or there's another company, a very popular expense company that allows employees to expense receipts. And they would have a feature called a smart scanning feature where you could take a picture of the receipt and then it would extract. But that wasn't a smart…”
Cody McLain Oct 17, 2022 ▶ 27:00 How I bootstrapped to $20m in 5 years (and 3 growth channels I used to hit first 100 customers)

How they sound: not measured why? →

We measure speaking style by listening to the audio itself, and a fair number needs at least 2,000 words from one person on tape we have measured. There is too little of Cody McLain on measured tape to publish a rate. This says nothing about how they speak.

Everything Cody McLain said on Top Founders that made the record, most notable first. Filter by type, assessment or year in the ledger →

Assertion Supported
A top expense app's 'smart scanning' was secretly powered by offshore humans
“Or there's another company, a very popular expense company that allows employees to expense receipts. And they would have a feature called a smart scanning feature where you could take a picture of the receipt and then it would extract. But that wasn't a smart…”
Cody McLain Oct 17, 2022 ▶ 27:00 How I bootstrapped to $20m in 5 years (and 3 growth channels I used to hit first 100 customers)
Insight
Standard operating procedures are easy to create but hard to maintain
“Processes, they're easy to create, but hard to maintain. They quickly become irrelevant, and if they're irrelevant, or say if you have a static process somewhere in a Google Doc, if somebody's not updating it, then nobody's gonna go and check it, and if they a…”
Cody McLain Oct 17, 2022 ▶ 17:20 How I bootstrapped to $20m in 5 years (and 3 growth channels I used to hit first 100 customers)
Insight
Founders should avoid splitting company equity fifty-fifty
“I've certainly, I certainly wouldn't recommend doing fifty-fifty, but that was just what we had at the time”
Cody McLain Jun 30, 2016 ▶ 4:13 EP 341: 15 Year Old Sells Company, Creates and Sells 3 More for Almost $1M with Cody McLain of SupportNinja
Insight
Web hosting acquisitions are typically valued at 1x forward revenue
“It's mostly just based on the one-year projection from the time of the sale.”
Cody McLain Jun 30, 2016 ▶ 10:25 EP 341: 15 Year Old Sells Company, Creates and Sells 3 More for Almost $1M with Cody McLain of SupportNinja
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Support Ninja grew from $3.9M to $25M ARR in four years
“We had about 3.9 million back in 2017. I founded the company in 2015 and 20 21. It almost hit twenty five million in ARR.”
Cody McLain Oct 17, 2022 ▶ 3:34 How I bootstrapped to $20m in 5 years (and 3 growth channels I used to hit first 100 customers)
Assertion Not checkable as stated
JPMorgan Chase runs one of the most selective Philippine BPOs
“One of the most successful, hard to get into outsourcing companies in the Philippines is JPMorgan Chase.”
Cody McLain Oct 17, 2022 ▶ 14:15 How I bootstrapped to $20m in 5 years (and 3 growth channels I used to hit first 100 customers)
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Support Ninja acquired its first BPO client using only Google Ads
“So Support Ninja started just as a website. I didn't do any investment other than I built a website and I put in some Google ads and we got our first customer, which ended up being this customer called Cleanify, which was this cleaning agent service nationwide…”
Cody McLain Oct 17, 2022 ▶ 17:59 How I bootstrapped to $20m in 5 years (and 3 growth channels I used to hit first 100 customers)
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Most of Support Ninja's early clients churned during onboarding
“And the other issue was that the majority of our clients, they would end up dropping off on this onboarding period.”
Cody McLain Oct 17, 2022 ▶ 20:12 How I bootstrapped to $20m in 5 years (and 3 growth channels I used to hit first 100 customers)
Assertion Not checkable as stated
SoftLayer shut down McClain's 100 servers after a hostile buyer's injunction
“What they ended up doing was shutting down all of our servers. And we had close to a hundred servers with thousands of customers.”
Cody McLain Jun 30, 2016 ▶ 7:08 EP 341: 15 Year Old Sells Company, Creates and Sells 3 More for Almost $1M with Cody McLain of SupportNinja
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Pacific Coast Hosting sold for just under $1 million
“Ah, yes, it was a little under a million.”
Cody McLain Jun 30, 2016 ▶ 12:07 EP 341: 15 Year Old Sells Company, Creates and Sells 3 More for Almost $1M with Cody McLain of SupportNinja
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Traditional BPO firms ignored startups in favor of large corporations
“And so I saw that there's a, there's something called BPO business process outsourcing, and it's been around for decades and it mostly services very high end corporations. And so I saw a need in the market to actually service these smaller end startups, whethe…”
Cody McLain Jun 30, 2016 ▶ 13:35 EP 341: 15 Year Old Sells Company, Creates and Sells 3 More for Almost $1M with Cody McLain of SupportNinja
Assertion Not checkable as stated
SupportNinja reached $1 million in annual contracts within 14 months
“Now that we're about 14 months into it we've actually surpassed a million dollars in annual contracts and we're able to actually work with some of the biggest tech companies out there, which is absolutely amazing.”
Cody McLain Jun 30, 2016 ▶ 14:14 EP 341: 15 Year Old Sells Company, Creates and Sells 3 More for Almost $1M with Cody McLain of SupportNinja
Disclosure
McClain retains 100% equity in SupportNinja without raising outside capital
“As well as the fact that I haven't had to take any outside capital and been able to retain all my equity is fantastic.”
Cody McLain Jun 30, 2016 ▶ 14:30 EP 341: 15 Year Old Sells Company, Creates and Sells 3 More for Almost $1M with Cody McLain of SupportNinja
Assertion Not checkable as stated
McLain ran his first business as a dropout in foster care
“And so my parents died when I was young. I was partly in foster care while I was running my first business. And it was something that I was basically put into a corner of dropped out of high school.”
Cody McLain Oct 17, 2022 ▶ 4:14 How I bootstrapped to $20m in 5 years (and 3 growth channels I used to hit first 100 customers)
Assertion Not checkable as stated
McClain's teenage hosting venture generated up to $150K before merging
“I'd like to say maybe a hundred, a 150,000.”
Cody McLain Jun 30, 2016 ▶ 3:27 EP 341: 15 Year Old Sells Company, Creates and Sells 3 More for Almost $1M with Cody McLain of SupportNinja
Assertion Not checkable as stated
McClain's hosting business generated over $500,000 in annual revenue
“It was a little over half a million.”
Cody McLain Jun 30, 2016 ▶ 7:16 EP 341: 15 Year Old Sells Company, Creates and Sells 3 More for Almost $1M with Cody McLain of SupportNinja
Assertion Not checkable as stated
SupportNinja employs over 100 agents in the Philippines
“Our team size in the Philippines, we have a little over a hundred agents. Our team size here in the U S there, everybody's working remotely right now. We have about five.”
Cody McLain Jun 30, 2016 ▶ 19:38 EP 341: 15 Year Old Sells Company, Creates and Sells 3 More for Almost $1M with Cody McLain of SupportNinja

The other half of the tape: Cody McLain's own voice is left out of every number here. Other people bring the name up 5 times in 2 episodes on Top Founders. every mention, with the transcript →

Who brings them up most Nathan Latka 5

Every mention by year

tap a year for its mentions
0031522016episodesmentions
0122016episodes it came up in
001.312.522016episodesmentions per episode
2016 5 mentions in 2 episodes 3 per episode

Appearances (1)

EpisodeDateSpeaking time
EP 341: 15 Year Old Sells Company, Creates and Sells 3 More for Almost $1M with Cody McLai Jun 30, 2016 13m

Played on the show (1)

Episodes where a recording of Cody McLain was played rather than Cody taking part, or where the tape carries an address with nobody putting questions to them. Listed because the words are on the record, kept out of every score on this page because they were not said on this show. We read this off the tape: who was spoken to, who was asked something, who answered whom.

EpisodeDateOn tapeWhat it is
How I bootstrapped to $20m in 5 years (and 3 growth channels I used to hit first 100 custo Oct 17, 2022 23m aired address
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