"Justin, I built a SaaS!"

Hello and welcome to Build Your SaaS. This is the behind the scenes story of building a web app in 2025. I'm Justin Jackson, cofounder of transistor.fm.

And I'm Harris Kenny, founder of OutboundSync.

Yes. Now Harris and I have known each other for a while. Longtime listener of Build Your SaaS. Right?

Oh, yeah.

And I wanted to have Harris on because he sent me an email with the subject line, I did it. I built my SaaS. And Harris has been sharing his story with me over the years. I know he's had multiple attempts. And I think what was exciting to me, Harris, is just this is hard.

Yeah. For sure. Well, I appreciate being on, man. I mean, yeah, I I listened to the the show for years. And so and, yeah, I hadn't had a bunch of attempts and always kind of look up to you from afar. We almost met in person at Podcast Movement when it was in Denver, and we we asked Yeah.

How did that because I was looking at that email too, and I was like, so you had emailed me, like, oh, I'm going to go to podcast movement in Denver, and then we just never crossed paths. Well, I was only there for a

little bit. It was when I was things were really crazy at that time.

Okay.

And so I just didn't have a lot of time. So I was like, hey. I wanna go, and I'm like, I hope I'll catch Justin. Take out the boots, but if I don't catch him so I just like it was like, well, what you've talked about for years of just like no margin. Like, I've just been living a no margin life for a while.

Yeah. I mean, I I think that's gonna resonate with a lot of people. As an aside, this is something I've been thinking about for a while is you're a part of this Mega Maker community that I've been running since 02/2013. And I'd like to do some more real life meetups with Mega Maker folks. And maybe I have to take my son to university in Toronto this summer. So I was thinking, oh, maybe we could do a meetup in Toronto. Where are you based out of, by the way?

I'm based in Denver.

You're in Denver. Okay. So, yeah, I'm gonna try to do some, like, on both sides of the continent. And, yeah, hopefully, we can still hang out Yes. In person.

Definitely. I mean, assuming nothing tragic happens, but I mean, I mean, I'm here, and I would love to. And I so I joined Mega Maker, but then left. And I I had joined a bunch of things and left kind of, like, in the early days.

Why'd you why did you leave? You just felt like it was too much. Not what was the reason?

So I left, like, everything. It's like I got off Twitter. I left MicroConf. I left Mega Maker. So I quit my job in 2019.

Yeah. Let's go back to that. Okay. 2019, you quit your job.

Quit my job. I had had a bunch of bosses, and I was my wife and wife and I were thinking about starting a family and having kids. And I just like couldn't envision being able to do the things I would want to do as a husband and dad in these like work environments I'd had for the previous decade.

Just because they were- it was long hours or stressed or-

Just not like a lot of flexibility. It's like, you know, and like, well, what if I, like, need to go to an appointment? And the the boss said I'd had at the time was he's like, well, we don't really want you here. It's like, well, yeah, but, like, I can just, like, do this stuff later on my computer. Like, it's not

Yeah. I don't know.

I just didn't feel like I would be able to do it the way I want it to be. You know?

I had I had a great like, when I got into tech in 02/2008, I had a great boss. But even then, I remember there being some things that graded on me. One was I didn't like other people looking at my screen while I was working. In truthfulness, like my day now, if you looked at my screen, you might not have any idea of what I'm doing. You know what?

you remember Shawshank Redemption? You ever see that movie? Mhmm. You just, like, reminds me of that. And, yeah, I mean, I I felt like it just felt arbitrary. I mean, I was in a role where I was at that in that in that position, performance based. Part part of it was, like, commission or performance kicker based on the team meeting its sales goals, but nobody else was. Yeah. So, like, I would need things. I would be like, hey.

to share

it with people. So then like I ended up putting it up like on GitHub or something. And then linked the GitHub thing from the support center because the support team wasn't willing to let me put it there. And it was like, why is this so hard? Yeah.

is definitely the DNA of a entrepreneur. I I think like there's that feeling of it's not truly oppressive, but there's these corporate structures that can just feel like they're gating you in. And if you're a fast horse and you just want to run, this feeling of being gated in is such a frustrating feeling. Like, and good companies and good teams, I think, will reward that behavior, that kind of taking initiative. And I'm going to make sure this happens, or here's a great suggestion, or like, let's do this.

That's how I felt. Yeah. Like, I think that, like, the company was well run and profitable and doing well. And so I was like, this is probably a me thing, but I was like, look, I've had like a few jobs at this point. Like, at at some point, maybe I'm the problem here, and, like, maybe I need to do the different thing. Because it's like nothing that they were doing there was, like, obviously on its face. Like, how could you? How dare you? You know? It it was just, like, it like, grading.

Oh, yeah. I think this is the I think this is the realization is it's if you're a fast horse and you want to run, there's just some structures that aren't going to be work for you. And that's fine. Like, if if the boss or the team or the culture or the business model or the market just necessitates something else, like if you really want a remote job, but the company is really a on prem culture and, you know, you need to be there. Well, you're just not the right fit for that place.

but That's what I was that's that's definitely it. Right? So I was like, okay. I said if I can get a project for 50% of my income so at the time, we had we had, like, had our first house. Yeah. We had our first mortgage, but that was like so I didn't need a a w two to get approved for the mortgage.

Yeah. A check. Yeah. Always get your get your mortgage before you quit your job.

Definitely. Because you can always drive Uber, but they're not gonna approve you if you're driving Uber. But, you know, there's like a difference between showing you make money and actually being able to make the money. Right? Yeah.

And these were commitments for projects? Like, these were clients?

Market client consulting. Like, let me help you with your sales.

Okay. So you emailed a bunch of people, said, hey. I'm looking to make the jump. I need some clients. Will you be my client?

Let's do it. Like, signed, closed, contract signed. We're gonna start next week. So I was like, okay. I'll I'll work weird hours. I'll make this work until I can get to 50%. Got it. So So I waited till people, like, were like, okay. We're going. We'll pay you kind of thing.

And did you have a goal in mind? Like, I need to get this number of people on retainer? Or It was just half

of my income. I forget exactly what my income was at the time. Yeah. But it was just half. I figured if I could get to half, then I could get the other half is what is what my guess was. So I saw one contract. Basically, one contract was enough, but there was only a two month contract. So I was like, okay. I've got two months of half my income. Yeah.

Oh, wow.

Yeah. So it was like, oh, okay. Okay. And and and it was just me in my house with one laptop. So it was like all profit margin with no expenses. And so it was a really good start.

Yeah. But that drive, some people quit their job. They have all this extra time and they find it's actually the opposite. Without somebody driving them, without somebody pushing them, they don't have that relentlessness you need to go out and find clients.

Yeah.

And I think that's a good litmus test. It's like once you have the time, do you have the drive? Like after I'd quit my job, there was times where, for example, course sales were like enough. And I was like, I got to go build some WordPress websites for people. And it's just this like dogged, relentless drive to say, I'm gonna do whatever it takes. I'm gonna email 100 people until I sell, you know, 10 website contracts and I'm going to build them all and then, you know, live to see another day.

Yeah. I think the anticipation of like, that we would be starting our family, I mean, like, within a year or so, our daughter was born. And so I think that was like I had this in my head of like, I've gotta I gotta kinda get this thing off the ground because things are so that to me was a big motive. I can't like I can't disentangle that.

Yeah. Yeah. Dependence is a huge that's true, actually. Like, before I had kids, I didn't have that same drive that I did after once I realized, wow. This is this is expensive.

This is just like Just keeps going up.

Yeah. And expensive in a sense, like, it's expensive with your time, your energy, but your money. It's just like you can't just live in a one bedroom condo anymore. You've gotta you've gotta get more space. You gotta get a car. You gotta get a car seat.

Yeah. Oh, yeah. Totally. Yeah. There's just hard hard cash flow hits that come with that.

Yeah. So so 2019, you you launched this, you get some clients. COVID hit in 2020. So Yeah. What what did that affect you at all or

what Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So terrible timing. Just couldn't have really couldn't have done it worse in a lot of ways.

What? Because it it affected it poorly? Was just so stressful

and that we were expecting at the time. So every time I got to the mean, in the beginning it was really unknown. Then especially because we were expecting during that time, it was really anxiety inducing. And I think the biggest thing I realized was like, what if I get sick? So I had these clients and it's going well, but like, they're just really paying me to talk to them about stuff.

Were you familiar with software as a service or web apps? Like, was that you came from like a a world where you're selling hardware?

Yeah. I was I didn't have software background. I mean, I had done like ERP consulting in 2013 as a as an account executive. I mean, so no. I mean, I mean, I'd never worked for a SaaS company at all. I never worked for a company that had a dollar in SaaS revenue.

How did it even come on your radar? Like how did you I found

Rob Walling's stuff first and that tipped me off in SaaS and then I found Build Your SaaS and Transistor.

Okay.

And then it just kind of like, was like, because what I wanted was like to take care of my family and to build good business. So then it's like, what kind of business? And so because of like the pressures of COVID and family and like, I'm in my late thirties right now. And so, and I'd like finished business school. I like, I had, I think, very compressed learning cycles of like very quickly, like, this is a good idea.

Mean, doesn't seem that long in my if you think about it, it's been six years.

So Yeah.

It it's been six five or six years since you even kind of realized what the SaaS market industry category, how it works. So that's pretty compressed.

Yeah. I mean, I guess in hindsight, yeah. Yeah. It feels like a long time. It feels like a long time.

I think what's interesting is that pull that you just described, I think is quite common for people investigating, especially this space, because that was always the promise is like, okay, what do I desire? Well, I don't want to work a job. I then you try consulting and you're like, okay, consulting works, but you have to keep this thing every sales cycle is you're starting from zero again. I mean, it's not really zero, but it's like it can feel like that.

Oh, no. Definitely. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, basically is. Unless you start developing IP and, you know.

Yeah. I mean, I guess the the reason I say it's not always from zero because you still have your network. Like, you still have former clients you can go back to and say, hey, let's do another engagement or whatever. But it can feel like you're always starting from zero. And then there's the stress of that and like delivering projects on time and, you know, and like even like having to wake up early.

Mhmm. Exactly. So that's that's how I kinda land on it. But then I'm like, okay. I gotta learn about SaaS.

This is so key. Like, there's a you're gonna need some foundation of knowledge. But after you've got a reasonable foundation, you need to go out and do stuff. You need to go out and start building things. And I felt this like I started the Product People podcast in 02/2012.

at some point. Exactly. You gotta land on your butt and be like, okay.

Yeah.

That was fine.

So that's I I think that's great that you had that self knowledge probably driven by the fact that you didn't have very much time.

That was it. It was like, oh, man. And it it was kind of like a little sad because it was like, oh, like, is fun. Like, I like talking to these people. Like, this is funny. This is my community. I'm home alone. Yeah. I have no real coworkers. I like, all my friends have jobs, and then we have a young kid, and so I don't have a lot of time in general.

Yeah. Okay. So you get this agency going. Agency's going. And it's working or what what happened?

Like, it's working. It's working. I'm acquiring customers. Like, I'm starting to, like, feel what it's like to get on a wave a little bit. Mhmm. Because with my consulting, like, I had this feeling of like, yeah, I've got these relationships, but like, I don't have that many relationships. Like, at some point, like, is gonna go away and then what? But now with the agency, it was like, oh, this is a problem. People are landing in spam. They need new leads.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. You got to hustle.

He was like, you know, I really want this, cold email data from Smart Lead. I really want it in HubSpot. And I was like, oh, yeah. Like, we're HubSpot partner. Everyone in HubSpot always talks about inbound, inbound, inbound.

Yeah.

If it if it takes off.

Okay. So let let a client is paying you to help them manage when you say outbound, you're talking about sending cold email

Yep.

Trying to get leads. Yep. And this client says, this is good. They weren't paying they weren't a high value customer, but they just said, this is good. I really want this like, once you get me a lead, I want this to move into HubSpot, which I'm using as my CRM.

Mm-mm. No. No. Yeah. At least not publicly. But then I realized like, actually quite a few of our HubSpot clients are doing outbound. Yes. And actually HubSpot themselves has a huge sales team with like a few 100 salespeople and they totally do outbound.

Yeah. So this seems like a gap. Like, this is a opportunity.

Exactly.

So what did that translate into? What what did you do with that information?

Well, I started to build something. So I started to build it in make.com.

Okay.

SmartLead had webhooks, and I thought, okay. Well, I can take these webhook payloads. Like, as these events occur in SmartLead, an email is sent, a reply is received. As these happen, I can take those events, map them, and push them to HubSpot. Okay. I I I remember saying, like, how hard like, how hard could it be? You know? Yeah. Yeah. There's this quote. We do things not because they're easy, but because we thought they would be easy.

That's that's the entrepreneur's Yeah. Mantra. Yeah.

So that was it. The the the pinboard the pinboard guy said that, and I it's I think about it all. It's on LinkedIn. Think about it all the time. I remember literally being like, oh, yeah. Like, how are gonna be? And I said that to him. And so so this is May 2023. So Okay. Did we

miss a part here? Because you did try to build IntroCRM.

Oh, yes. So my agency was called IntroCRM. Yes. Sorry. I covered some of the I missed I skipped some of the SaaS stuff because because it was never a SaaS. Okay. I tried doing IntroCRM as a SaaS, and now and my agency just became IntroCRM, but we never I never had a single paying customer. I built something in Bubble. Oh, man. Sorry. I forgot about I haven't thought about that in, like, in, like, a while. No.

That's that's okay.

Yeah. Yeah. So oh, yeah. It was so bad. Don't even remember it. My first necessity was a CRM.

Yes. So you were doing this agency, and then you're like, okay. I'm gonna try to build some software.

Yes. Right.

And then you built this tool called InterCRM in Bubble, but it didn't really take off? It didn't really work?

No. Not at all. So it was like my thought was like, I was using Basecamp. Oh, man. Sorry. Oh, man. Totally spaced on this chapter. Mm-mm. That's fine. I was using Basecamp, and I was like, oh, Basecamp, they're discontinuing Highrise. Like, there's no CRM like Basecamp, and they're not doing Highrise anymore. There should be a simple CRM for everybody that everybody can use.

Opportunity. And and, mean, Highrise was, I think, doing, I don't know, three to five million a year or something like that. Like, it was it was on Basecamp scale, it wasn't success successful, quote unquote. But for most of us, that would be an amazing business.

Exactly. And I thought, like, okay. And I really looked up to Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansen. And part of my idea of, like, going from agency to SaaS was, like, exactly what they had done. So they were really influential in my mind at the time. I don't know. It's hard to know. When I'm being, like, self critical, I would say, well, they were really they were really running a design agency. They were really crafts people and, know Mhmm. What was I doing?

do that? They're just humans too. I mean, they're they are very gifted in in many ways. But earlier in my career, I applied for a job there and flew to Chicago and spent a day with the team. And that was my sense after that day was I had like kind of put them up on a pedestal. But then after spending a day with them, I'm like, oh, these are just human beings. Like, they're Yeah. There's they are again, they are good at what they do. They're skilled. It wasn't, like, magical.

they would probably be, like, the first ones to say that. Right?

Yeah. Yeah. I think so too.

They would

be like

I mean, they you know, I don't think you know, they just had to have a brand, they did it early, they've done it at an incredible scale. I think so so IntraCRM was my first SaaS idea. I built it with Bubble myself. I got help from so my first idea was an integration. I was like, okay.

And so you tried to sell it to folks, but it just didn't work?

I was like, well, so, like, we have this basic CRM and it comes with these services. Okay. And they were like, we just we just wanna work with you. We don't we don't want your CRM.

Got it. So the so when you pitched people on it, they were like, like, we just want the services part. Why why do you think they didn't want the CRM? Like, what were they using instead?

They just, like, didn't check it, didn't log into it. I had, like, an amazing client, and she was just very kind. And I felt like if anyone, she would have just, like, logged in just out of, like, curiosity and sympathy

Yeah. Or pity.

And even she had never logged in. So I was like, okay. This is like, nobody cares about this, really.

I think what's interesting about this is your hypothesis seems reasonable.

Mhmm.

And so then, you know, there's different questions. Is it is it the way you're marketing it? Is the way you're positioning it? Is it the actual product isn't solid? So those folks that weren't logging in, what were they doing instead? Like, what were they using instead of your CRM? Were they just using no CRM? Like, they Yeah. There wasn't actually any movement there?

Yeah. They would like use nothing or they would use a Google Sheet or they would just kind of manage it out of their inbox. I think there's like a version of this, but I don't think I have founder market fit to build it. It has to be like a product led thing. It would have to be like, you just drop in and like now with AI and these AI native tools, I could imagine there being a CRM that connects with Gmail.

Yeah, and then they would so you were in this kind of in between IntroCRM as a software product was like in an in between state and that was like not quite right.

Yeah. It just didn't quite land. But but I was right that people like, the the core idea of, like, these things don't talk to each other, that has, like, a thread that has been true for a while. And, like, even back to the three d printing company and even back to the ERP consulting company, like, partnerships has been, like, the thread of growth through, like, fifteen years of my career through the companies that I've grown. That is like a that is like a continuity thing.

I think that is such a crucial observation. It doesn't mean your hypotheses will always be correct, but that alone is just true. And in an AI world, I feel like that's more true than ever. Like everybody's typing into ChatGPT and Claude, but there's still not a lot of glue between like, Claude could tell you to go do something, but then you've gotta there's this chasm that jump over. You're the one that's got to go do what it just told you to do.

I think so. Absolutely. And here's the thing. So someone would say, well, yeah, of course, you gotta enter this thing into Claude, then you gotta go to the other thing. Well, that's where MCP servers come in, and that's why agentic workflows are so exciting. Yeah. I mean, any developer, Hey, so tomorrow I'm going to publish our database schema. Nothing will be lost, no security issues. I'm just going to publish it and post it online. Like, do you would you be proud of that?

The edge cases are what's real. This is why every time I look at a demo, like somebody releases some sort of demo, it's like, okay, this is not a real company. This is not a real use case. This is not nothing. This is all fantasy.

Yeah. That's how you discover problems. Yeah. Well, that's where yeah. And that's where it gets complicated. Yeah. But no. I I think that like with I mean, with AI, I mean, imagine if you had like a library, you know, like a physical library. Mhmm. But like no card catalog.

That also seems like a good idea.

Yeah. It wasn't it wasn't, like, wasn't, like, the worst. You know? I mean, it I mean, it's it's kinda like an LLM concept. Right? It's like reinforcement training

from

the person who knows. It took a lot of work, and, again, like, they they weren't spending the time on it. I I don't know. It just for whatever reason, it didn't quite click. People didn't wanna do it or or they were just getting too lost in the weeds. Mhmm. And I was like, yeah. Like, I understand what you're saying, but we just need to send some email. And if if it's not a fit, they just won't get back to us. It's okay.

You know that oh, that's such an interesting the thought I just had, because you've mentioned this twice now, which is, like, they couldn't take the time or make the effort to log in. Or they couldn't take the time or make the effort to log in, in this case, score some leads or whatever. I think this happens a lot more than we realize, which is there's just a certain category of applications where you're not gonna get people to log in, and that's difficult. It's like it's like I'll I'll I'll use this as an example. I actually love this tool and I pay for this tool, but I think it's still a good example is seotesting.com.

Mhmm.

I love this product. You know, they're friends of mine. I think it's a great product. But my interaction with the product is basically at this point 95% just through the emails they send me of here's this month's top keywords, here's the winners and losers. Am I setting up a lot of SEO tests?

Exactly.

Yeah. That's interesting.

So it just, like, it didn't it didn't quite click. It was so then the the third idea that I had was draft studio. This was like an early g GPT wrapper product. I actually use it internally. So in cold email, there's this thing called SpinTax where you give it a word and then you give it variations of that word. So like, hello, hi, hey, hey there, greetings, good morning, good afternoon, whatever.

Yeah.

And so you could like take an email or you could take a phrase, drop it into draft studio. It would spin up permutations of that and then spit out spin tax that you could just drop into Smart Lead so that your emails would be different from each other, which would help with deliverability. Yeah. Actually, I liked it. I used it a lot.

that also seems like the kind of thing that eventually if I could figure out a process for doing that in ChatGPT or Claude, I would just do that. Totally.

Yeah. Yeah. So like that but it was okay. But it was technically a SaaS. I built it in Glide. I thought about charging for it. And then and then so so that all of those things happened between, like, when interest CRM, I registered that domain in 2020. Yeah. And then I started building up on sync in May 2023.

Okay.

So that was I think it was my fourth idea. My fifth idea, which I've, like, almost not really talked about very much, but it was card importer. There was, like, the HubSpot's default card importer is actually really not great.

Okay.

And so it was, like, a really basic take a picture of your business card, scans it in HubSpot. It's actually a really big like, it's a thing. There's a lot of HubSpot comments and a forum about wanting these features. I posted a YouTube video. I still get messages on LinkedIn about it.

Yeah. I mean, I think that's what's interesting is none of these ideas actually seem bad. They all seem like reasonable bets. And it's kind of like you can follow all of the advice for looking for business ideas. Like you go into the forums and what are people commenting about?

Totally.

Right? So you you can do all of the foundational work, but their chances, their odds of hitting a baseball are much higher than mine are. Right? Totally. So all of that foundational work matters. You've got to do all that work to get up to the plate and have a reasonable shot at hitting the ball. And then even then, you might hit it. You might foul. You might walk. You might just get a line drive.

Mhmm.

But it's still it's like a lot of players get up to bat and they strike out.

Right.

And they're good players.

But what's the number? It's like if you bat 300, you're in the hall of fame or what you know, there's something like that.

Yeah. I mean, I I'm actually not a baseball fan.

Yeah. I'm not I'm not either, but I know there's some number where it's like not that many. And if you actually hit that many, you're like one of the best of all time kind of thing.

I mean, this is the this is the whole point. I think this is why sports is a in some ways, sports is a bad metaphor for business because sports really is zero sum. Right. Business has there's more opportunities. Like, there can be multiple CRM software providers, and, you know, you could still win.

Yeah. Well, it's like the harder I work, the luckier I get. Right? It's like, I definitely think this was like a lot of a lot of work. But but so because of all this, when outbound synced, like, when I did that and I started talking about it to people, I was

like Sync is your is the idea that you're working on right now.

This is

the one that worked.

Yes. I've been doing this for two years. It's profitable. We've got three people on the team. We've been growing 10 to 20% every month literally since we since October 2023. Like it like and but there were there were things that were happening with it where I was like, this has never happened before.

Okay. Okay. What's different. Let let's explore that. So you you went through these other ideas. All of them are like, maybe you get on base, but it's not really or maybe you don't even get on base. Yeah.

And then Maybe by

domain. Yeah. Maybe by domain. Yeah. Maybe by domain. So what was the genesis of outbound sync? What like, what was the observation that you're like, oh, some this is worth doing?

So, you know, so I had that client. He said he wanted them to talk to each other. I said, okay. Sounds interesting. Built out a basic version of it. And then I started posting about it on LinkedIn because LinkedIn is my only water cooler at this point.

Okay.

Because I figured like the people who if I'm gonna build something based on the space that I'm in, they're gonna be there. Yeah. Probably. So I start posting about it there. I post about it in some WhatsApp groups, and I get some people biting. So in outbound, a lot of people are in WhatsApp groups, just by the way. I don't

know why.

It's very international. Like, very there are some biases, but in general, it's pretty meritocratic. I've got a lot of people who I talk with who are like, I don't know their name. I don't know their face. I don't know anything about them, but they're in these groups and they're kind of anonymous like hacker chat kind of growth hacker chats.

How did you get in those WhatsApp groups?

That's a good question. I don't well, when I was running my agency, that's when I got exposure to some of those chats and, like, other agency owners are in some of those groups.

Okay. And they'd say, hey. You might wanna join this group.

Yeah. Hey. Oh, yeah. Exactly. And, like, one of them, like, they had, like, a just, like, they were promoting it to, like, hey. Join my group. And there's no caution in it that I just kind of joined the group. Share best practices. There's kind of like a guild. You know, there's, like it's kind of like there's honor among thieves.

I do think this is a key action that a lot of founders don't take, which is you said, I'm going to get off everything that's a distraction, and I'm gonna go where my clients are. So LinkedIn is a natural choice. And then you're also getting in these WhatsApp groups. Yeah. And I think when you're thinking about where to invest your time, I don't think people realize that in a given industry or category This is why I think actual participants in a given industry or category have such an advantage over somebody who's just flying in because it looks like a good business opportunity, is you have to be simmering in that community.

Yes.

Right. You're doing that, like, I think it's pretty hard. I think it's hard to build a podcast hosting application if you're not a podcaster. There's just something about knowing the pain, about knowing lots of other podcasters that are trying to do it too, of knowing what it's like to to conceptualize a show, and then record into a shitty mic, and then, you know, try to publish it and then be listening to it and hearing background noise and like cringing. That whole process, until you understand it in an organic way like I could describe it to somebody, but until you've experienced it, until you know the pain of releasing something publicly and having people not respond to it or trying to get distribution for it or trying to get people to notice, you just don't understand.

Definitely. And so what's funny about where we are today is that those two places I was spending my time represent, like, the two parts of the business. Mhmm. I'll I'll we we can cut we'll keep we'll keep riffing, but, like, the agencies are not our direct customer today. But they're our peers and they are the channel that we sell through, and I consider them friends.

Yes. Yeah.

Yeah. You know, like, just to be like, that's like my role in those communities. We have fun. We're having fun.

And again, hard to replicate that, to have that kind of rapport with people in the industry. So we should really paint a picture. So outbound sync, what does it do? Like, what was what's the the job it's doing for people?

Yes. So the job to be done. So we get the data. So we had this low code thing. People are interested. I started having big calls with people. I realized this is not gonna work. Like, I'm manually OAuth ing into accounts. People someone just asked me about SOC two. We have a make scenario. I'm like, SOC two? I don't know. Here's makes security documentation. Yeah. We refactored into full code.

Okay.

I can give them the context of that full thread of a conversation.

Got

it. I can see all the sent emails before that. So like reply routing. Because like growth hackers were doing this in the beginning. So they would be like to their founder led customer, here's a Slack message.

fire hose of leads. Yes. And then your app just says, okay, I've got to get these leads to the right people in the organization Yep. With the right context, with the right information.

Exactly.

Got it.

And we empower the internal revenue op revenue operations or HubSpot or Salesforce admin to build the rules for that routing or the like channeling the Firehose. We allow them to build it themselves inside of HubSpot and Salesforce.

Got it.

So I, like, sort of finally came to grips with, I'm gonna not gonna try to make people log in to anything

Yes. You went to where they already are.

Yeah. You wanna be in HubSpot. I'm gonna give you this data in HubSpot. You don't need to log in. You would log in to our application one time, and then you're never able to look at it again. Yeah. We we build pipes.

Got it.

Like, just use the sink. Don't worry about where the water's coming from.

And does it show up in HubSpot and Salesforce as an official app?

Yes. So we're we're in the marketplace in HubSpot and we're working on Salesforce app exchange. That's like more of a process. But the biggest surprise learning I had in the beginning was that you actually don't need to be in the marketplace to get distribution through them. So when we talk about building a SaaS or starting a SaaS, we had dozens and dozens of HubSpot customers before we had a marketplace listing.

Okay.

So it's because I was able to get HubSpot, I posted on LinkedIn and HubSpot users were like, we're using Smart Lead, I want that in HubSpot. And they just reach out to me.

Got it.

And they would install it as a private connected app. So I was not using HubSpot as a direct distribution channel, if that makes sense. I was riding the HubSpot wave, but HubSpot wasn't putting me on the board. Do you know what I mean?

So if you posted on LinkedIn and said, you know, if you have this problem and you use HubSpot, here's a solution. And so people that were using HubSpot, it was enough for them to go, oh, I use HubSpot and then go, oh, I have that problem. Exactly. Okay. Now I'm gonna pursue the solution.

Exactly. Because they weren't even thinking to search for it in the marketplace because no HubSpot so few HubSpot teams were even using these tools.

Yeah.

So there was no like search discovery motion. The place that at this time, like even still, people are learning about these new cutting edge things in Slack and on LinkedIn. There's no like, hey, we need to go buy a digital sales room tool or we need to go buy a landing page tool, go search in the HubSpot marketplace and see what's available. Like that wasn't a thing.

Got it.

You know?

Got it.

For more like there is for more established categories.

So wow. This is interesting. So so you launched this thing and you're primarily getting customers through LinkedIn and relationships? Is that

Well, initially, because I still have my agency, all the revenue came from my clients. And once again, I I forced tried to bundle them, but this time it worked. Yeah. I said, listen. I run an agency. We specialize in helping teams that use HubSpot get new leads, and we have this tool to get give you those leads. It's called outbound sync. And they're like, yeah, sure. We need leads. If you get in HubSpot, great.

Yeah. And you shared your graph with me. Yeah. It it it's pretty like it's like 15% a month, you'd say, in terms of growth. Let me

see if I can I can share one? We're not like doing the build in public thing with numbers, but I can share my screen without the Numbers.

Sure, There's a little share button down there. You should be able to use that.

Yeah. So this is like the transition. I've not talked about this with anybody anywhere yet. Nobody's asked. This is the journey from services revenue to software. So purple is my services or consulting revenue and green is my SaaS. This is gross top line, you know, money made. And so if you're just listening, I mean, it's pretty much a cross fade. I mean, you've got you can describe it probably better than me, but, yeah, I mean, this is kind of this has been the journey.

Yeah. On one hand, so starting in 2023, most of your revenue is consulting. And then you see around well, I guess this would be just at the end of 2023, you start to get software revenue. And then the software revenue just grows every single month. And then gradually, the consulting revenue well, not gradually, actually, it comes off, you know, you can see the transition point where you're just like, oh, it's time to switch to yeah.

Thanks, man. Yeah. For sure. I I feel like we're we're there. I mean, I'll tell you this transition point, May 2024. So friend of the pod, friend of so many people, Ruben Mhmm. Gomes. When things were taking off, I I emailed Ruben and I was like, hey, I think things are going pretty well. Like, tell me about TinySeed. Like, I've got this agency. I have these expenses. Like, we have childcare costs. I have a mortgage. We have two cars. Like, my I mean, my wife works in health care.

Mhmm.

How do you balance tasks between those two things? Like, it's different. The math does math. Like Mhmm. One, this this pays my mortgage, but this one is is valued at the top line. The other know, my services are valued at bottom line, like, EBITDA or whatever, like, how much profit they're generating. The software is is valued on paper at the top line of how much the MRR is or ARR is.

Yeah.

But like but like, this isn't a lot of money, that is a lot of money, but this is technically worth more. And then like, this is a little fix, but it's just a little bug. And this is like something where if I don't get back to them, they'll fire me right away. Yeah. And and so, like, it's literally it's impossible to decide what to do Mhmm. At any given moment. Yeah. Because the comparison is it's it's apples and oranges. Yeah. And so that was like the appeal.

Yeah. I

felt like the momentum was just like sort of undeniable, but I couldn't. I needed a bridge. Yeah. I just, I couldn't get it to grow fast enough to pay my bills. And I didn't know what I was doing. I had never gotten this level of success before. And so I didn't know how to like the learning I had done in the beginning, it got me here. And then all of a sudden I like slammed into a ceiling of like, I don't know what to do. I don't even know who to ask for help. Yeah.

think. I've never heard anyone describe using TinySeed as a bridge before. So you've got this, like, clear momentum with the SaaS. It's growing month over month. But in order to transition from consulting to this new thing, you need something to bridge the gap. And in it sounds like in your case, that was both money, but also just having more people in your court that could help you, could help strategize, could help make decisions.

Both. Definitely.

Yeah. Did you use the money for hiring? Like or was it just as runway for yourself?

Yeah. All all three. So I use it a little bit runway for myself. I brought on CSM. I brought brought our engineer on full time.

What's a CSM?

Oh, sorry. Customer Success Success Manager.

Oh, okay.

And then engineer on full time. And then we also got SOC two. Which was totally worth it. But just like upfront capital intensive things, the other thing that happened is at the tiny seed, when the founders all met up, I had all of a sudden agencies started texting me and they're like, Hey dude, heard you're winding down. I've always been curious about outbound sync.

80% of like revenue leads? Oh, wow.

Yeah. So now, like, so agencies who I've been friends with this whole time and I've always been like sharing notes with them. Yeah. Now they have clients who come in and they say, listen, we're a 1,500 employee company, series d company. We have money. Yeah. We have people, not the problem. We just need the best. We need someone who's willing to take chances and do really interesting things. And like that's what agencies are for.

I see. So this is not like a a a standard, like, affiliate program. This is Mm-mm. A program a partner's program where you are giving the partner's leads.

They bring them to us. We refer some. I've inferred I I I referred Anthropic, so that's a pretty good one.

Oh,

yeah. But we don't have a ton of leads. They bring them into us generally. But what we bring is we bring the tool and then we bring a lot of support. So we set up a Slack connect channel with them and with their customer, and our CSM is in there.

Yes. Got it.

Understand how to sift through signals and how to get the right people, we'll make sure that it's a lead in Salesforce with the right fields populated, created at the right time Yeah. Assigned to the right person kind of thing.

So for your partners, you are enabling a whole new category of business for them. Yes. And giving them a superpower when they have a new client, they can they're like, oh, wow. I can use outbound sync for this. Outbound sync is gonna provide me with all the support and the tooling to do this job that might be too big for them to do normally or or whatever.

Yeah. It's just hard. It's just it's just it is a software required. The only way to do this is is with software. Yeah. The funny thing is that these people are like they have their own, like, dev resources typically. They have tons of really sophisticated internal tooling. It's just, like, hard enough and enough of a headache that that I that there's enough of an opportunity for us to build

Yeah. To to for you to for them to outsource it to you.

And they're happy to, by the way. Like, I've had people tell me, like, dude, I'm spending I've got a bunch of vendors who are spending a bunch money. App on Sync is the only one that I'm not even I don't even feel like negotiating with you because I don't ever wanna think about Salesforce.

I mean, that's a great signal. Yeah. I mean, that's the whole beauty about SaaS is you're basically socializing the cost of software, but also support across thousands of customers. Exactly. And so, you know, I'm looking at your pricing right now.

I think we go over the top with support. Yeah. I think if someone if I you know, if someone were to come in today, they would be like, you gotta dial that back.

Yeah. I I I mean, I think we go over the top with support at Transistor too.

I been a Transistor customer. I agree. And it was awesome. And I, like, I loved the experience.

I think that's just like again, it's one of those things where if the whole world is going to AI chatbots and support docs and or, you know, poorly paid customer support people that aren't professionals, then what's one way to stand out? It's it's having unbelievable customer support. And it takes less people than, you know, to support 36,000 users on Transistor, which is probably, I don't know, 8,000 paying accounts. That's two full time people to do that. So it's an investment, but it's less people than you might think to do that work.

Well and people remember, you know, and then you get better feedback. The AI support thing, I've had such negative experiences with that. And the thing is, like, because we have ears to the ground, like, we're able to ship better features. Mhmm. And it's I don't know.

Oh, To me, it's That's the other thing is that, you know, AI might answer people's questions, and then it might give you analytics on the most you know? But it can't see the subtext. It can't observe things. It can't make notes and say, oh, man. Like, I can really dig in here and see what is causing what's motivating this customer and then also what's causing their problem.

Right. Resolved. Anything else?

Yep. And our propensity as humans is to wanna move on. But the founder's job is to say, let's slow this down. Hey. Tell me more about that. Like, what's going on there? What are you using right now? Okay. And is there like, you're paying for that. Okay. Is it working for you? What's working? What's not? That's the magic right there.

Yeah. I mean, I totally I mean, I totally agree. So, yeah, I mean, for us, that's super important and we we're yeah. We're we're in this funny spot where, like, all the time people are like, why can't I just do this with Zapier? I think it's like a really good bootstrap business opportunity.

Yeah.

He's like, Dude, what time is it? I'm like, Oh, it doesn't matter. Like, can you just tell me if this is working yet?

Yeah.

Like, it was was excruciatingly painful. You know, we went through some family medical stuff in between, which I don't really talk about publicly, but it was extraordinarily difficult. And we've like subsequently had a second child. And so it's like, life just is happening. While all of this is happening too.

won't build it. And being able to observe those their reactions and everything. Yeah. So everything you're telling me, Harris, just reminds me of this article by Rob Snyder called How Loom Found Pull. And the idea is that you want instead of like pushing a solution all the time, you want where there's just natural pull.

you if you scroll up that thing, I mean, this totally mirrors. So like today, like I had a like, this week, we've been like, recently, we changed our pricing and since we changed our pricing in we me. I changed our pricing in, like, late April after I went to MicroConf. Yeah. And I listened to Marcos Rivera. It's called like street pricing. Yeah. I I listened to his microconf talk literally five times and then plus all the other random stuff.

Okay.

And we and I think we've really since since then, conversations have been going even even better. So it's like for us, like who are we designing for? It's revenue teams using HubSpot and Salesforce. Yeah. So they typically have multiple salespeople, and and they're running this, like, outbound motion.

And I think this is the point is that if you can't honestly and realistically and reasonably fill out this hypotheses worksheet, already that's a no go. Now the hypotheses worksheet does not mean you're automatically going to hit a home run. But the way you just described it, I can there's just these key points. It's like, this is a project on their list that's unavoidable right now. How do we know that?

Exactly. Yeah. There's board level metrics. Like, have customers who are like the VP of marketing is like, I have a board meeting next week. Mhmm. I have a question about this app on sync data because our internal admin is gonna build a report for me for my board meeting kind of thing. And

you can in customer interviews and investigations, you can ask questions that will reveal this, which is what are you doing about this problem right now? So you say it's on your list. You've got a project that's unavoidable that you say is unavoidable. You say it's on your list. What are you actually doing to solve that? And if they're like, not much. I haven't really looked for anything yet. Like, what have you considered? Not much. It's like, okay. This isn't yes. Sure. It's on your list, but

Yeah.

I don't see actual motion. Like, the customer has to be in motion in a real serious way for it to work. This is like, I built that that project with a college grad called Swag Fan. It's like Yeah. Yeah. Making swag. Now I use it. It's great. But that is not a serious project on most people's list. And so it's it's never gonna have that same pull that something else would.

Well, so the urgency thing, I mean, for sure. There's so much to that. Last thing on this where I think it's super interesting is like the value goes both ways for the agencies too. They want to be able to prove results. Yeah. And so when we get the data into that important system, they can show the customers the value. Mhmm. So for them, it helps with retention too. Yeah. And it helps them get credit when there's conversion that they didn't directly drive.

But this is the important piece I want people to take away. This is a journey. It's like you deciding as a founder, I'm going to do this. And at the beginning, you think it's gonna be a one or two year project. Like, I'm gonna I'm gonna quit my job, and I'm gonna get this done in two years, and I'm gonna have a great business.

Thanks, man. Yeah. I I mean, yeah, I learned so much. I I mean, I feel like I was learning so much for so long from you. So when we connected and talking about coming back on here, felt like a really yeah. Like a full circle thing. I was happy to do it. You know? We like, yeah. Like, feel like it's the end of the beginning now.

yeah. I mean, once you get out of that scrappy bets stage where, like, good investors, good people who make people who are good at making bets, eventually, the whole idea is that they are betting resources that they can lose. Right. So it's like, this is a pretty good bet. But if I lose this bet, it's not the end of the world. Whereas when you're at the beginning and you're bootstrapping and you're scrappy, it's like, if I lose this bet, yeah, like, it could be rough. You know?

Yeah.

And it felt like every bet leading up to Transistor was like that for me. It was like Yeah. Okay. Like, this is I am kinda betting the farm every time. That's why it's so hard.

Yeah. Outboundsync.com. And then, yeah, LinkedIn, Harris Kenny. Look me up. As we've been embracing our partners, I post really weird funny stuff, like, about Pokemon, and I've been posting memes. And just like we found our ICP, and so I'm just having fun, like, posting for them. Oh, sweet. So so yeah. So if you if you like kind of funny goofy LinkedIn, go there. If you're looking for inspiration, it's you're it's not the place.

Sweet. Sweet. Well, thanks so much for being here. I'm gonna read out our supporters because we haven't done our Patreon shout outs in a while. So thanks to everyone who's still supporting the show on Patreon. We've got Pascal. We've got Greg Park. We've got Mitchell Davis. We've got Marcel Folle. We've got Bill Condo. We've got Ward from memberspace.com. Evander Sassy, Austin Loveless, Michael Sidberg, Colin Gray, and Dave Junta. Thanks, everybody. Thanks, Harris. See you soon.