390: Hubstaff: Overcoming Early Struggles to Bootstrap to $22M ARR

Jared welcome to the show thanks for having me I'm excited to be on here my pleasure do you have a favorite quote something that inspires or motivates you that you can share with us yeah well one of the quotes that stuck with me when I first read it was uh from Steve Jobs and he talked about making a dent in the universe and it it's something that just really resonated with me of like you know if you're going to spend like we we've spent 11 years now building Hub staff and I think about like why

did we do it and yes wanted to start start a business and you know make a make a living off of it but it's more than that it it's like can we do can I put something out into the world that actually makes an impact like leaves a mark out there and you know something I get excited about is hundreds of thousands of users getting to use our software and making an impact in their lives so that that's a quote that stands out to me yeah great so tell us about Hub staff what does the

product do who's it for and what's the main problem you're helping to solve yeah so hubstaff is it started out as time tracking and proof of work software and what that means is not just collecting the time that people are are spending working but also how are they doing that work and answering those questions around how they're spending their day that's how we started the business and that was the the kind of the elevator pitch or the the initial use case and we've since grown that to be more of a Workforce Analytics platform so that

you now can you can manage people's schedules you can see how much time they spend in meetings you can really get a a real bird's eye and detailed view of where that time is being spent great and give us a sense of the size of the business where are you in terms of Revenue customers size of Team yep uh so we we started in early 2012 in May of 2012 uh and we we've grown that steadily now to a22 million AR business we have slightly over a 100 team members working at hubstaff and over 16,000

customers awesome and we should also point out that the business was bootstrapped for the first 10 or 11 years yes yep we were fully bootstrapped never didn't take any investment dollars up until August of last year um and had no debt on the business either which is something both my co-founder and I very proud that we were able to do this in a customer funded way great so let's talk about where the idea came from so you and your co-founder Dave um you you said you set out in in 2012 but where did the idea

come from he he was running at the time an SEO uh business where they were doing uh video uh production and blog uh writing and basically back in the early days of Google when it was easy to try to game it and and help clients get better rankings in Google so he had 40 people working for him uh at that time through upwork and he looked at that and the business was doing just over a million dollars a year in Revenue he looked at the 10% markup that upwork was applying on these 40 contractors and

thought to himself I can find these people I can hire them outside of this Marketplace um and you know use LinkedIn used job boards but what he didn't want to give up by leaving up work was the software that they had put in place which was this time tracking desktop app that also recorded some proof of work metrics to show that this person in Spain or Ukraine or you know wherever you hired them you've never met them before you know are they when they send you an invoice where they working for the time that they

invoiced you for and that was the simple use case and he he was looking for a tool he thought he was just going to search on Google find some Standalone tool that could do this didn't find anything in this is late 20 and thought you know I think there's an opportunity here to create a standalone SAS product just taking that software component um that he was used to using on upwork so he reached out to you on LinkedIn right he did and did you did you guys know each other no it was cold Outreach through

Linkedin and he uh he he was looking at that time he knew he' already built a proof of concept using a a development agency out of Russia that to build for $10,000 a a basic version of this software just to kind of prove out if there was a market for it and uh he did by the time he was reaching out to me through Linkedin he had 15 paying customers and he knew that you know to to take this and turn into a real business he couldn't rely on this agency to do the development for

the next several years so he was looking for a tech co-founder that as in his words somebody who would lay awake at night worrying about the technical issues while he laid awake at night worrying about the business and marketing side of it and he wanted somebody local um and I was in Indianapolis at the time where he lives and it luckily was kind of a small pond of of tech people in that space so he reached out to me and what what were you doing at the time I so I was doing some contract work

for a local company there in Indiana and also running and this is part of why he reached out I was running a site called talento that it was a a community for developers and designers and I was you know kind of playing around with that in nights and weekends building that and trying to get that out into the world and he he looked at that and said because he told me this in subsequent calls he was like it stood out to him that I had been able to build something and get it done and released

and when he was looking at other possible Tech co-founders they had on paper they looked good but what if they put out there how do they actually execute and get stuff completed and that stood out to him so I'm curious why you said yes to a random stranger who reaches out to you it wasn't an immediate yes how long did it take three months yeah I want to know what the process was that you went through because I talked to a lot of Founders who are non-technical and they looking for a technical co-founder and you

know I I tell them that you know one it's a really difficult thing to do to find the right person and secondly it's not just about it's not like hiring a developer you if you're going to bring on a co-founder they've really got to buy into your vision and believe in whatever you're doing because they're going to end up spending a lot of time on this thing or even there's the opportunity cost of not you know giving up what they're doing to make time to to even work on this thing part-time for for a year

or whatever so what convinced you to say yes even though he took like you know three months to get there yeah so I and I will admit and I've told him this too when he first reached out I other people had reached out similarly where they have a concept they think it's a million-dollar concept they would reach out to me being a developer like just need to talk Jared into building this thing with Sweat Equity and we'll be Off to the Races and I all of those people the difference between when they approached me and

when Dave approached me Dave got on a 30-minute call with me and starts off by saying first you could easily describe the elevator pitch what was the value prop which is let's have time tracking plus proof of work you get the invoice you know they really worked for that time you happily pay the invoice that made sense and then number two he had already done a proof of concept he had already basically followed the lean started up methodology that was you know really popular at the time and I had read the book about that and

you know I asked him was like so you know how' you know to follow the Lean Startup methodology and you've read the book right and he's like no clue what I was talking about and just happened to like just intuitively that's just he's all about execution so he just like went from concept to like I'm going to hire the agency I'm going to get something out there I'm going to run some ads I'm going to start doing some SEO see if there's demand and when he's talking to me he's rattling off here's how many visitors

I have coming to the website here's how many paying customers that are voting with their wallet that I already have this was very different than other people that approached me so and he' already he was running a business doing over a million dollars at the time which was like you know I couldn't even imagine running a business of that size at that time so those are the things that hooked me and then we we realized what you were saying if you're going to start a business with somebody you're basically getting married to them you better

like them as a person and that's why it took three months and it like that was kind of Our dating process that happened over the next three months how much money did the two of you put in to the business to kind of get it to the next level I guess from what Dave had already done yeah so we we each uh from the from that point forward we put uh $52,000 in between the two of us and I I know it cuz we wrote it in like two or three checks so it's like it's

a very specific number of like and you know not at that age and and you know I didn't have tons of money so like using that amount of capital to start this business and I'm I'm very low risk you know as an entrepreneur a lot of people would be surprised that you know like I I don't want to lose money I don't want to put this on the line if I think it it's not going to work out so that number stood out like it it was $52,000 that the two of us put in and

we were that got us our first few hires and got us we started writing code in May of 2012 and in August of 2013 we were able to start charging for the product we released it into beta in November of 2012 and then in August of 2013 we began charging and that $52,000 got us through that and then we were able to to be customer funded from then on okay so let's talk about that that first year or so when you start to build the product did you did you look at what was already there

and say okay you know we can just continue the the development or was this okay that was a great proof of concept but really I want to do this my way yeah yeah it had to be and not in any sort of egotistical I it needs to be my code it was just the the people so we were fortunate I I I had gotten to meet somebody in my first job out of college who I would describe as a as a 10xer sort of developer like it you know you meet very few of these types

of developers you know you know them when you see them and they what they're capable of and the architecture and the the amount of code that they can create um like that I think was very important for us to have in the in the very beginning stages of the business and the reason Dave was coming to me and first place was because there were bugs because there were issues with the software and he was already starting to see that that it wasn't a good foundation to build on so we knew we needed to rebuild it

we had good talent to be able to do the server side programming to come in and do the desktop application as well um it was actually this 10xer programmer um named ed and I asked Ed because he's he's very much on the server side of development I asked him who's going to who's going to build the Windows application CU my background is in Tech of computer science degree I was but mine my background is all on server side as well so we had serers side tied up and he goes well I have a brother who's

a pretty good programmer too and I think we can talk him into doing the windows Linux and Mac desktop app and we were able to do that and it was really the three of us in those early days that wrote all of that code and we knew because of the type of code we could write we could we could create a scalable foundation for the software so we never had to you know fortunately we've never had to make another version we've always just added to and evolved the software we never had to do a V1

and then a V2 of the platform and move customers over and so I I think that was because of that decision to start it the right way in the beginning how did you spend that $52,000 cuz it's I mean even even back in 2012 it doesn't sound like that would even pay much for a developer's time no it it doesn't go very far it was almost all spent on Ed and his brother on development that that's where almost all of it went so we I think our ad budget back then was maybe $500 a month

uh Dave and I obviously are are working for free and so we you know Dave's just handling all the he's writing the content he wrote an ebook he's writing the blog posts at that point he's doing all of the SEO he's managing the books so it was just we knew we were going to live or die by the product we had to get this to a certain point um and we felt like we were on to something that we knew it's not going to be too long before others start to recognize that there's an opportunity

here so there's a bit of a race component of like let's get this product to that next stage of features that that are immediately being requested from users you mentioned that I think August 2013 you began charging for the product but uh how long did it take for you to actually have uh users on the product like when did you get to a point where you were able to ship the first version yeah so we because Dave had already started the website before he even approached me and we we ended up keeping the name we

went through a list of probably 50 different possible names and once and decided at the end of the day hubstaff was was the name that we really both still like so stuck with the name it already had some SEO it already had some traffic coming to it we we shut that agency software down and put up a wait list because it it just we were not getting enough new customers to make it worth the distraction of trying to support that software and handle support requests for it while being heads down writing the correct version of

the software so we made that decision to shut the website off basically put up a weit list and then we had probably a thousand or 2,000 people on the weit list by November when we had a very you know our first version our beta version ready to go and put it out there and it was late October early November turned the website back on the marketing page to it uh invited these users in and we were I remember it distinctly because in previous like I ever since graduating from college i' always try to get you

know being a developer I would work on these projects and that I would get very excited about the potential for them and you know be very convinced that hundreds or thousands of users are going to want to to try this software out I'd build it I'd put it out there and it was like a real struggle to get them to use this thing versus with hubstaff when we we turned that website back on we're getting 100 users signing up for it almost in the first day that we turned it back on it would be at

a it was at a run rate of about a hundred users signing up a day um from that first day okay great so uh you you you get the product out there you've got some traction some momentum with the the waiting list but it's still a free product right so that's you know the jury still out so you come August time comes and you decide you're going to start charging for it one what was the first how much did you start charging initially and and two what happened when you turned turned that on yeah I

would say of all of the debates that Dave and I had through the years the probably the healthiest debates where we we would come at it from different angles was probably around pricing Dave had the mindset that let's we go volume we go low price high volume let's let's try to it get we the reality was something that he would think about a lot too is what every customer that we get in here every account that gets created for you to get real value of the software you're going to invite other people in so we

want to give it away as much as possible let people invite their team members in they're going to learn about Hub staff maybe when they move on to the next job they're going to recommend it to their new you know employer or their clients so we started off with a I believe it was a free forever plan for for up to three users and then we charge something like $5 a user for every if you were four plus you get charged five bucks a user and I think we might even back then have said your

first three users even if you're beyond three your first three are free I mean we we were bending over backwards to try to make price not an issue we we didn't want to to you know lose this momentum that we had built up and I think we probably over indexed to being a little too inexpensive but it the conversion rate was very high because it really kind of a no-brainer if if this thing could save you from one extra hour being invoiced to you that wasn't really worked then it it's well worth the the money

to you know $5 a month and and what happened when you when you started you you put the the payment option and they're like how long did it take for that that first customer paying customer to sign up oh probably I mean well we converted people over that were on the free plan too so that was all of our existing customers we had been messaging them that the beta is going to come to an end you're going to start getting charged so we we had that first customer start their 30-day trial that day uh and

become a paid customer 30 days later and then also all of of the existing customers switch over over that you know we we probably did it over a 30-day period as well um but it was it was a media so I think uh you told me that it took about two and a half three years to get to your first million in ARR what was the biggest growth driver was that SEO yeah yep SEO it continues to be the the biggest driver for us today uh and back then it was 99% of our customer acquisition

channel was SEO and I I really credit that to Dave coming up with a concept that like I think I think of it like a totem pole of pain points we were at the very top of that totem pole of these our our typical customer back then was somebody who was starting their own business they were funding it out of pocket they were hiring these developers that were less expensive over sees maybe they're not technical in nature so they when this developer says it's going to take me 2 months to build this WordPress plugin and

now you're in month three or four and it's not finished yet you don't have much recourse to know what's going on are they are they really working for all of that time um are they working for multiple clients and so these people I believe are really having like sleepless nights and they're waking up in the morning going there's got to be a solution to this problem they're going to Google and they're searching for our type of software and so the name of the game was just get found just be in the top three for that

when they do the searches figure out what those various keywords are that they're searching on and just do whatever you have to do to be in the top three and then the product will take care of the rest do do you think SEO worked quicker for you guys well it wasn't really quicker right because it was Dave was already kind of doing some of this work before the two of you even join join forces right y y so that kind of help you to hit the ground running fairly quickly with once you had the new

product built and he was still able to do some of that while we were you once we set we shut the website down he was still writing blog posts he started he worked on an ebook you know he's doing all of that type of stuff still so I generally you know you won't see results for that 3 to six month period of like putting that content out there it's got to take a little while um but we already had that Head Start so Dave was focused on growth and SEO and content and you were focused

on the product and continuing to evolve that what was going on competitively because it sounds like you know the the SEO you've you've identified keywords there's you know fairly decent demand once people find you there's signing up was there a lot of competitive offerings around it at the time there were not no that that was another that part of that three-month dating process was of us evaluating the space in more detail and really coming up with like a checklist and saying is there a verality piece to this is there are there going to be a

lot of are there a lot of competitors now and do we think there'll be a lot of competitors in the future and something we've been very conscious about from the beginning was this is not a solution at least what we start started with isn't a solution that everybody's going to look for it's you know there's an aspect to the software that some people may not want to use this type of software um because of the proof of work piece to it and it it worked for us in keeping a lot competitors to a minimum it

wasn't like when you when you ask yourself is are one of the incumbents one of the big software companies going to move into the space we were pretty confident that they weren't going to want to touch the space at least for very long time so then we knew we're just going to fight against other companies that would be our size and how many of those did we see out there there were like one or two you know in late 2012 and they were all getting they were getting started right around the same time as us

so it it was not a highly competitive space and luckily for that next five years it we didn't see a huge influx of competitors come into the space so it allowed us to cut our teeth and and learn because we were we we started from step one like learning how to do how do you create a good product how do you do SEO well we certainly didn't start out doing those things at a at a very high level but we were able to survive because it wasn't a super competitive space and gave us the room

to learn that okay so you get to the first million I I guess if we just get 20 somewhere around 2016 I'm guessing is when you get there uh SEO being the the biggest driver I know you you said that hey you know the product has also been one of the one of the reasons why we've been able to get to where we are today and the importance of building the right product and we always hear you know building a great product is super important but what does that actually mean what does that mean to

you well number number one and I think this is the right mindset to adopt is to not not think that you have a great product as soon as you start thinking that then you rest on your laurels you're like all right you know we we just like you want to iterate on what you're doing whether it's the SEO whether it's it's your parts of your product I believe just rapid iteration is a superpower and when we looked at even from the beginning when when you're fa we were faced with we have 10 more more features

that customers are asking for we can spend all of our time over the next three months building those 10 features or we can do five or eight of those features and spend some of that bandwidth building test systems into the software building data collection integrating tools like segment or mix panel or at that time it was Kiss metrics get insights into how users are flowing through the pathways of the software you've created and then work on iterating on that so something we did with like the onboarding flow we wouldn't take the approach where we would

improve the onboarding flow and then be happy with it and leave it alone for six months we would do a project to improve it and then next month we would revisit it and look at the we're looking at the data weekly along the way and do another version of it and another version after that and just never stop improving the onboarding flow and how you're acquiring these customers so I think that when you when you look at how do you create a good product I think understand what the features are that solve the pain points

your customers need yes you need those but then how easily do they get through into the software and get to those features and how are you improving that flow yeah you were doing product L growth before it was a thing I remember with the really started getting coined as a term you know five or so years ago and it like it just seemed so like yeah right isn't wasn't everybody doing that already so you mentioned kiss metrics and and and mix panel I'm curious what like maybe if like if you were doing it again today

you were starting over what and you were using one of those tools or something similar what are some of the things that you would be tracking in terms of metrics to to get some of these fundamental things in place because I I see this a lot with teams like yeah we're going to use mix panel and then it's like they're overwhelmed with data and they're just like wasting so much time just trying to make sense of it and so like from from the experience that you've had and if you're doing this again how would you

do it in a way where you could use these tools get the instrumentation in place get the the just the essential data that you need to be able to make faster decision yeah and I I really liked kiss metrics I think was one of the first that popularized like an easy to look at funnel of here's step one you hit the sign you you go to the marketing page then you go to the sign up page and then we've we've always had three four or five steps in the in the post signup trial like getting

your trial started and I would say just start there I wouldn't look at a lot of other like we we would play with hot jar off and on throughout the the years trying to look at recorded sessions and see how people are using like actually using the software and I feel like you're right you can get paralyzed by looking at too much data figure out that that initial flow coming into the software and just event those steps just even if it's just page view data and not even events you don't need the buttons evented you

don't need all of that detail you just need step one step two step three and what's the falloff percent between them how many are getting to the end of The Wizard and then look at you know how many of them are then going to maybe one two or three key Pages within the product after they get through the wizard and then how many are going to the like subscribing to a paid Plan and there's your funnel and just now go through six iterations of how to improve that over the next you know half a year

to a year great so it sounds like you got pretty good at that in terms of you know you're attracting the traffic you're uh you're basically getting these people to sign up go through the process and come out on the other side and become a a paying customer what about uh in terms of usage like so once they're actually a customer what are the some of the things that you looked at to make sure like they actually still using the product how frequently are they using the product why did you do that yeah I I

think they're again simple as kind of King just look at daily active users weekly active users um what what is that kind of histogram that dat over a month of somebody's usage pattern so they use it a few times every day for the first three or four days and then you see this drop off and you know why are they not coming back 7 days later or 10 days later and usually the the barrier to creating the Habit it happens very early so if you can get somebody to come back every day or every other

day to your software for just 5 to 10 days then they're typically that's going to be very highly correlated to them uh continuing to use it for months even years at that point so it's just get them to use it for that first week or two that and that we started off with a 30-day trial and we decreased that to 14 days and actually saw conversion rates go up by decreasing that they created that sense of urgency for the customer they knew like I don't have all month to try to figure out if I want

to use this or not let's get into it now the more you can frontload and push them to go and try things out like iterate on the getting started system try a lot of different ways to get them to go and use the different features at least go to the page you know we've experimented with welcome videos when welcome mats when you go to a new feature um try it as a popup versus on the actual page itself just really trying a lot of different things and looking at what the data is telling you there

I think some people listening to your story might be thinking you got this idea you built this product you already had a a waiting list growing you start charging for it people start paying and within a few years you hit your first million in ARR it kind of sounds like too easy and I I sort of said that to you before we we started recording and then you told me about all the times that you had tried to do this and it failed so can you just talk about that because I think that really is

I think that really helps will help people to understand like the the reason things went so much better for you guys this time was because of all the Reps that you had put in before you got to this point so it it has always stood out to me and it's something that I share with other entrepreneurs when they they ask you know what are what what's something that you can tell me to you know kind of set me on the right path and the number one thing I say is don't get too married to your

concept I I'm a big believer come up with five or 10 concept ceps and try those out and I feel like that that's kind of what my journey was of you know being a developer I could go put things out into the world I didn't have to go find a Dev to make what I was envisioning I could Envision it I could work hard on it nights and weekends and I did that from like through college out graduated from college working my day job still doing stuff at night and on the weekends and and built

inventory software I built talent offly that Designer developer community and I learned through that what it felt like to have to try to it's like pushing that boulder up the hill of like trying to get people to care enough about what you care so much about you feel like this is going to be amazing you put it out there and you're having to pull people to it you you know you know the feeling when it's happening of like th this isn't coming easy I'm having to create the market for it and there are some some

Concepts you do like they're brand new there's not there's not latent demand out there that's pent up ready to be tapped that's not every concept but I having been through both sides of it feeling what it was like to try to create that demand and then over here where it was just let's go meet that demand where it is and go to that and provide the solution I can the feeling is night and day different and it I I maybe there's that extra bonus points for like you created a brand new market and that's even

cooler but I'm a big believer and go find where there is the demand that's not being satisfied today and go create something to meet that it is incredibly rewarding and you know while you're doing it you know it because it it feels that way you can tell the difference yeah yeah yeah I think that that's a that's a great distinction I in terms of if you're going out there and and effectively creating a new category you've got a whole set of other problems to deal with because no one's even looking to solve that problem so

you've got to educate people and and if you if it's not really the right problem it's it's a very very you know it is pushing a boulder uphill and then you got this other situation where it's like you find a problem that exists but it's not the most painful problem so people tell you yeah I this is a problem but they don't really feel motivated to do anything about it or haven't really invested a lot of time and effort trying to solve it right and I've seen Founders like who find that problem and they talk

to customers and it's like and and that's the thing they try to go and solve and then they still struggle because people just don't care that much about solving it but once you get to that point where you find this this this um bleeding neck problem it's like you don't have to do a lot of convincing right you just need to get the solution in front of people um and so I think that it's it's a it's a I've talked to many Founders about this and I think it's a very difficult thing to to explain

to somebody who hasn't experienced it but it is like night and day right in terms of the the reaction and how people lean in and and and and want to use the product or want to pay for you they pay you for it before it's ready right it's like it's a very different type of experience when you find that right problem yeah and that the old adage about in MVP that you know if you weren't embarrassed when you put it out there you waited too long you you if it is not where there's pent up

demand you will like it won't work you'll put something out there that is embarrassingly basic and yeah it doesn't work because it has to be that much better to even have a chance of like creating the demand but over here like that first version that we put out yes technically the foundation was very good but UI wise we're all like architect developers the three of us the UI was atrocious and it didn't matter yeah all right so 20 you get to the first million 2016 uh you you continue to grow but you know growth is

relatively slow then we get to covid what was the before we went s went into the pandemic what was the size of the business were you kind of roughly in terms of Revenue or roughly six six million in ARR and like you said the slow climb like we are slowly climbing steady slow and steady towards seven and eight you can kind of see the trajectory but you know we were on the 10-year path or 15-year path to becoming a $15 million a year business and then what happened with Co yeah Co basically we we have

been I think this is another key Point too with that demand that we had tapped into that demand was also tied to a a trend a growing Trend that is remote work and hiring people to work remotely um just even globally for for your Workforce and so that I think that that was growing on a the similar steady linear path and then Co with the great experiment of having everybody work from home showed a lot of companies that this can be done for some companies it's maybe not ideal yes they should be back in the

office or go hybrid but for many companies it opened their eyes to this is really a way you can run a business and you can save a lot of capital running a business remotely and so it accelerated what we saw is accelerated this trend that was up and to the right but on a linear path it stepped it up probably 10 years overnight and just set it as a new here's the floor for it now and we doubled in size over the next just over 12 months because of it wow so I mean that that

turned out to be just the shift towards remote work turned out to be a a really good thing for for you guys in the business one of the things that I've also seen with with many startups is you know they they got a a great bump during covid and then after the pandemic it was like back to reality and you know in many cases they were like in the same place or maybe even slightly worse off than they were before they went into the pandemic what H what was that experience for you guys yeah and

we we were slightly worried what what would happen you know naturally we knew not everybody's going to be working remote 100% going forward so what what's going to be the new normal is how we referred to it where where is this going to settle out um and what what we have found is that has really in the two and a half years or so three years afterwards it it really normalized at about 3x what it was before covid so you had 7 to 10% of the workforce working fully remotely preco now it's 30% plus where

we had confidence that we weren't going to return back to to preco levels was just a lot of companies shed their offices they they're like why we don't need to pay for that anymore look at productivity stayed the same or went up and we're not having to incur that cost we also knew that that Trend that we had been riding since 2012 and we were we've been big Believers in from day one that trend's not going anywhere that trend's going to keep growing so yeah it was going to come back down from from that height

but we were pretty confident that you know we had stepped it up and like how could we ever have guessed that we were going to create something that was so uniquely positioned for that moment a very unfortunate moment that you know the Silver Lining was it was a huge boom to the business and just like you couldn't even plan it to be that well positioned for I really do think that work the remote Trend in global hiring trend is the biggest shift in the in business and how business businesses have been run since the Advent

of the PC this is like the second major moment and we were able to capitalize on it to some extent so the business as you you told us at at the start is doing about 22 million in ARR today you basically bootstrapped all the way and other than in the I guess in the last six months you raised some some money through private Equity when you you said yes to Dave in 2012 you know we we all have hopes when you start some new new thing what you wish it could become or what you hope

it could become but realistically like what was what was your realistic goal at the time that you thought if I could just get to this I'd be happy yeah in in those few moments where we weren't chained to our computers and we get together in Dave's basement and have a beer and we're like oh you know what could this become it I I can clearly tell you what we thought we were like we are going to be ecstatic if this gets to 40K of M you know $500,000 a year run rate like we're set we

can't ask for anything more than that and that's we would sit in his basement and say this that's amazing and what do you think I mean we talked about some of the factors along the way the the the product and and covid and and move to remote work and whatever but what do you think like when you look back and I what what's what's contributed to your success because this is a space where you talked there were a couple of competitors at the time but I also know that other competitors have come and gone in

the market here right so it's not like you were just the first so therefore or one of the first you you made it work what was the difference like what why do you think you guys were able to to to kind of win in this space yeah I I think something that has been crucial for us number one having the right recipe to start this with and I think Dave being having the SEO background know in that being what was going to be our number one customer acquisition Channel and he had the background he was

an expert in that so we didn't have to go out and rely on some you know agency or hire people to do that he could just do that himself and then I could do the tech side I I didn't write all the code but I could oversee it I knew how to steer that I knew how to make sure we had the right product design and the right Tech in place between the two of us we could cover the jobs that needed to be done over time we had to find people to come and take

those jobs and do it even better than we can do it but in the early days you've got to be able to do that all in your found your co-founding team and I I for a software business I'm a big believer that you need to have a tech co-founder it right there in the mech that has the equity that is going to work until 2: in the morning night after night for years to get this to where it needs to be and I would say that's Point number two is just willing to roll up your

sleeves and do the hard work when people come to me and they say I've got it I want to bounce something off of you I've got this concept for a business it's like you don't know it until you've been through building a business that the when they say the concept is 5% or 10% or whatever you know small portion of like what's going to determine success it's like 90% execution it's so true it's like is once your excitement in the honeymoon period wears off call that three or six months are you still going to work

until 2 in the morning night after night 16 hour 18 hour days for years to make this a reality and grind your way to that success and that's where you get separated from from the rest that's the companies that came and went they just they I think they didn't have the right starting formula and they didn't have that perseverance to just I don't even know how we did it looking back on it I don't know that I can do it again but it is just tirelessly grinding it out love it all right on that note

we should uh wrap up uh let's get on to the lightning round I've got seven quick fire questions for you what's one of the best pieces of business advice you've received I as I mentioned earlier I would I would say if your MVP doesn't embarrass you then you spent too long polishing it get it out there quicker and start validating your concept much faster what book would you recommend to our audience and why I love the high growth handbook big fan of it and open it regularly to specific chapters to consult things what's one attribute

or characteristic in your mind of a successful founder uh be willing to put in the hard work day after day month after month year after year what's your favorite personal productivity tool or habit I started doing this in the last year and I'm a big believer now is blocking out focus time don't let anybody take that over have multiple hours consecutively a focus time once or twice a week what's a new or crazy business idea you'd love to pursue if you had the time so yes this one is it's out there it's uh transparent OLED

windows so especially if you live in a City you could uh you you can turn your window into whatever landscape or picture you would really want to see looking out that instead of the building next to you wow that's I haven't seen those what a cool idea um what's an interesting or fun fact about you that most people don't know so my my hobby when I do have a few moments of spare time is to do Sim racing interesting and and finally what's one of your most important passions outside of your work I I am

all about like helping my kids and helping other kids at our school and in in groups get excited about uh Steam and get them into robotics get them to do coding challenges compete in state Tech fairs anything it can do to help kids get excited about going into engineering a great way to spend your time a worthwhile thing to do love that great so thank you so much for joining me it's been a pleasure talking and and unpacking the story of what you and Dave and and the rest of your team have done over the

last you know 11 or 12 Years a lot to uncover would love to continue the conversation but we only have so much time so uh I hope we did Justice to to telling your story and and what you guys have done if people want to learn more about hubstaff they can go to hubstaff docomo that yeah they they email me at Jared hubstaff docomo thank you so much it's been a pleasure and uh I wish you and the team the best of success well thank you it was great being on my pleasure cheers