You're listening to Startups with the Rest of Us. I'm your host, Rob Walling, and in this episode, I talk with Noah Tucker, the founder of Social Snowball, about how he, as a non-technical founder, has bootstrapped Social Snowball to millions in ARR. And in the episode, he says they're between 5 and 10 million in ARR and growing about 30K of MRR per month. It's an incredible story.
about overcoming the challenges of not knowing how to hire good engineers and having a code base that's falling apart. and eventually finding very strong product market fit, moving up market, and now he's in a spot where he has an incredible engineering org in place. but none of it fell into his lap. And it's really a story of a lot of hard work, grinding to learn new skills, as well as some luck, as there always is.
Before we dive in to my conversation with Noah, I want to remind you that if you are doing seven or eight figures in ARR and you're thinking that you might want to sell your SaaS business, let's say between one and a half and $20 million of ARR, Discretion, capital is the place. that I recommend people go. You can reach out to my Tiny C co-founder who is the founder and the principal of Discretion Capital at discretioncapital.com or email anar at discretioncapital.
if you want to learn more about how they can help you as a bootstrapped or mostly bootstrapped SaaS founder looking to sell their company. Also, I want to invite you to MicroConf Remote on May 21st. It's all about early stage sass. And it runs from 10 a.m. to 1 p.m. Eastern Time.
It's just three hours. We're going to have three presentations, amazing talks by Stephen Steers, Nick DeSabto, and Anastasia Kudrow, as well as Founder by Founder, which is like an online version of our famous MicroConf hallway track. Again, that's on May 21st, and even if you can't make it, if you get your ticket now, you'll get all the recordings. You can buy your ticket at microconf.com slash remote. I'll be emceeing it, and I hope to see you there.
And with that, let's dive into my conversation with Noah. Noah Tucker, thanks for joining me on the It's great to have you here, man. You're the founder of Social Snowball at socialsnowball.io. Your H1 is scale your affiliate revenue with creators and ambassadors. And then H2 is build and grow all of your word of mouth marketing programs from one place. Now, what that doesn't communicate is that you focus on e-com. Yes. Yep. Exclusively Shopify brands.
And so this is the amazing thing to me about the Shopify ecosystem is you are a SaaS app that is focused on affiliates. with creators and ambassadors. So that's a niche. And then you're niched down only. to Shopify, and yet... That is still a big enough niche to build an incredible business. Do you want to give folks an idea of where you stand today?
Yeah, I mean, the Shopify ecosystem is pretty big, but we have about 2,700 customers, a bit more, so those are Shopify brands using the platform. We're a full-time team of 24, and we are between 5 and 10 million of ARR. Good for you, man. And did you raise any funding? No, I mean, technically it's a very, very small angel round, which was just like friends and family. It was nothing significant. We burnt it all on Upwork developers in like three weeks.
So you're pretty much bootstrapped. Yeah. And we'll get into our run-ins in 2021 around social snowballing. We'll get into that a little bit. Hell of a business, man. Five to ten million. When you started it, it kind of evolved, it sounds, between 2017 and 2019. As you graduated from high school, you got into e-commerce. and you said that you had your own, you had a brand or two that you built yourself, and you ran into this problem, right? What was it? Yeah, essentially like...
Especially I was young. I wanted to grow these businesses. So these are just random products I was trying to sell on Shopify. It's supplements, electronics, all this. So, you know, one of the growth channels I wanted to explore was influencers on Instagram. And the only thing I cared about at the time was driving revenue with those influencers. So I wanted those influencers to create content, post on Instagram, and I wanted to be able to incentivize them to do that and track their sales.
and believe it or not there was no tool that was like perfectly focused on just that there was affiliate platforms that were more built for like publisher relationships so not Instagram creators and then there were influencer management tools but those didn't really have a lot of affiliate tracking so there was nothing to really incentivize them to drive revenue it was more just about incentivizing them to create a post but not track any of the actual performance of the posts and for me like
bootstrapped i was like you know 17 18 19 i was trying to drive revenue i needed to drive revenue there's nothing else that really mattered there was just nothing that existed that was an affiliate platform for creators and influencers and that's essentially how the idea started That's interesting. So it sounds like a Venn diagram where one circle is affiliate management. And I'm familiar with a ton of those. I've had founders of them on the show.
And then the side that I'm still familiar with, not as familiar with, is the influencer relationship side. We've had several apply to TinySeed, so I've talked to them, but I haven't been as intimately involved in those. So would you describe Social Snowball as kind of the intersection of those two? Yes, very much. So tell me this then. What was missing from the traditional affiliate management? packages that Social Snowball does that they couldn't.
I mean, there's a lot of product-specific things, which I'm happy to share, but more like big picture, just the entire user experience was not as simple as creators needed to be. Creators are like consumers. Think of consumer SaaS. Everything has to be frictionless and easy and intuitive. And those are not our customers, so we don't have to deal with that. We sell to the brands. Everything, like onboarding, just signing up, generating a link in code, receiving a payout.
everything was just like very very clunky very outdated but for a professional like PR or publisher affiliate they're used to that that's their job full-time like they're fine with dealing with those platforms and it was built for them For a creator on Instagram, that's never used a platform that's more confusing than Instagram. It was just unrealistic. So a big piece of it was... influencer UX. Yeah. You're saying these are experience fascinating. So, okay.
So just to paint the picture, you're like 19 or 20 years old. You're non-technical, right? You don't know how to code. And you've run into this problem. What the hell made you think that you should go build this? Because that's super ambitious.
I think it was just my naiveness like I didn't know what to expect and I was maybe like running off the high of thinking oh well I built a few e-commerce stores how different is a software business and I really did think that and like looking back I just laugh at myself but I thought I genuinely thought that okay I know how to run a business you you have a product and then you run ads like and I was like okay
Well, for software, I need to hire an engineer to build a product. And then I'll just run ads. And that'll be the whole business. I'll build it once. It'll exist. No one will ever have to log it to GitHub again. And then I'll run ads. Be rich forever.
And that's what I thought. Yeah, obviously I learned that wasn't the case pretty fast. I think that should be so, you know, when you're rich and famous or you kind of are becoming that already, maybe this is going to be your course that you sell on X Twitter and LinkedIn of just... Dot, dot, dot, profit. Build it once. Never log into GitHub again. Man.
So thinking back, are you just like, ooh, cringe? Like, knowing now what you didn't know, like, should you still have done it? Well, I'm glad I did, but if I knew what I do now... I don't even know. It would have just been a totally different approach because that is what I tried to do. That wasn't just my idea. I hired an agency.
And they were never going to build an MVP, which turned into a complete disaster. But I had an MVP and then I literally started running ads to it. And then I very quickly realized that this is just not how a software business works. I really went ahead and executed that idea. I saw that through before I realized that this is not how a software business works.
And did you do, aside from you needing this product, did you do any type of validation or have any conversations with anybody to maybe be like, at least there's five other people that need it? A little bit. Honestly, at this point, I had been in this e-commerce community for a few years, so I had just friends that...
were running similar businesses. And I would ask them like, hey, have you tried any of the affiliate apps in the Shopify app store? And they were like, yeah, all of them suck. And they shared a similar pain points that I shared. I didn't do like proper market research validation, but I was really confident in it just from my own pain and just like the few friends that I reached out to. And so, as you said, you hired an agency to build an MVP, which is...
Yeah, that's tough. You can get lucky, obviously. I see MicroConf, TinyC podcast listener founders do this. I don't know what the number is. I could make something up. It's probably like...
70 or 80% of the time, it's a complete show. I would say like 95. It might be. It's a really high number. I don't want to overstate it, but you obviously fell in that bucket as well. So when you say it was... show what do you mean can you give us some numbers timelines like what exactly happened yeah so they i think they charged me something like 25k and this is like just i didn't have a lot of money saved this was like almost all the money i had saved up from my previous e-commerce ventures
Yes, they quoted me like 25k and they said it would take about three months for them to get the MVP that I wanted live and approved in the Shopify app store. And I kid you not, it took 15 months. before I terminated the contract early with them because we still couldn't get a working product. Like it was the textbook agency disaster, like textbook textbook. And at that point, then I hired a freelancer on Upwork who was decent enough.
to get it approved into the App Store, and I thought he would stay on full-time, but he didn't want to join full-time. He had a lot of other commitments, and then I ended up kind of going back into the wild trying to find developers. Yeah, and this, I mean, you've heard me say on this podcast that this, with...
single, non-technical founders, or founding teams that don't have a technical founder. This is the biggest headwind consistently, and we see it with TinySea founders as well. It's like, I don't want it to be the biggest headwind, but it is, like the product. SaaS products are f***ing complicated. They're more complicated than I wish they were, to be honest. And so...
I guess how did you dig yourself out of this? So you're in the Shopify app store now, but the code quality can't be good, so you probably have a bunch of bugs. It's probably hard. to add features, because there's a bunch of cruft and legacy, this and that. What were you, did you get, I guess to kind of piggyback on that, it's like, did you get customers early when you were in a Shopify app store, and then how did you deal with this basic technical debt from the start?
So we did get customers. I think the one thing that was my strong suit and still is, is just marketing and growth. And so at first we just partnered with a bunch of influencers that post YouTube videos and Instagram and whatever about e-commerce. And we actually got to 10K MRR in the first three months. So we had like decent growth. And with that 10K a month, I was like, okay, I can find some developers to work with.
That being said, I still didn't know how to find a good developer because as someone who looks at code and just sees gibberish, you can't tell a good developer from a bad developer.
So I went back to Upwork, which is, you know, another mistake again. And I hired more freelancers and it just, I mean, I'm kind of fast forwarding like a year at this point because it really was a year of just hiring and firing, hiring and firing these Upwork developers, everything breaking nonstop, customers getting pissed.
hiring again firing again just like it was a treadmill of that until I found someone who was pretty good and he told me he wanted to be my CTO and to me this was like exactly what I needed because I didn't have anyone that I really trusted as a leader in the engineering side. This guy proved to be probably the best engineer I've worked with so far. And he wants to be my CTO. He said he'd take a huge pay cut in exchange for some equity. And I was like, okay, this is actually...
exactly what I needed like this is the stars aligning and so this dude was based in Romania and I told him look I'm gonna fly to Romania I want to meet you in person let's sign the papers in person and you know do a toast and then kick off this partnership So that's exactly what I did. I was already in Barcelona with my girlfriend for New Year's, so we just hopped from Barcelona to Romania, met with him, spent some time, great vibes, signed the papers.
And then I flew back to the U.S. And two weeks later, he doesn't show up for work one day. And I'm just like, hey, are you OK? Like, what's going on? And then he's like, hey, can we jump on a call? I got to tell you something. I was like, okay. And we get on a call and he tells me that he has been applying to become a priest and he just got accepted and that he's going to move to a monastery now and he can only work a few hours a week.
Is that okay? Was what he said. And I was like, and I didn't say this, but I was thinking, no, that's actually probably the least okay thing you could have possibly came to me with. You just told me you wanted to be my CTO. I thought we're going all in on this thing, like grinding late night together, like getting things done.
And he's like, yeah, this is going to be like a side project for me now. I'm going to become a priest. So at that moment, I started another search for engineers. And I waited until the day before his equity vested to let him go. And I let him go. And then I just had no engineers. Just zero developers. I couldn't even log into GitHub on my own, and we just had nothing. Just me and one customer support person part-time.
And that was probably the hardest part of it all. That was one of the low points. It sounds like, oh my gosh, so you've spent a year trying to find an engineer. You finally find someone who wants to be your CTO. And the dude basically pulls a... It's not a full-on ghosting, but it's kind of just like drop the mic and exit. What the f*** was he thinking? I know. Who would do that? It's just such a weird thing to do to someone, you know?
It's just one of those things that you would never prepare for, your CTO having to become a priest. Like, you just never think of that. Yeah, or bailing on you at all, saying, I'm going to be your CTO, we sign papers, and then being like, whatever the reason. To suddenly only be like, I can work five hours a week. Like, this just makes no sense. It's like, then why did we, why did you waste my time? Oh my gosh. Yeah. Okay. So.
For a couple months then, you have no engineers. It's you in support. The product has to be like a rickshaw with good duct tape and bailing wire where you're just bleeding customers, like where is everyone pissed off? So believe it or not, we didn't lose too many customers because myself and the customer support guy, we were just grinding nonstop to keep people happy.
making promises that it'll get better soon honestly this was like one of the hardest periods of my life like i just remember thinking i was just gloomy like i was just down like i was spending all my time trying to deal with these fires at the same time find another engineer and at this point i'd already hired like 20 engineers and only one of them was decent so i didn't even really know what to do everyone i would talk to i'd be like is this just going to be the same thing over again
So I just didn't really know what to look for. And then some of our integration partners were reaching out saying, hey, like your API is sending us like thousands of requests. We're going to turn off the integration if this doesn't go off today. And I'm like, I don't know how to turn that off. Like it was just.
bad. And so what I did at the time is I just reached out to one of our previous freelancers that was also pretty good a different one but also couldn't join full-time that happened a couple times and i was like dude i will do anything if you could just spend weekends or nights or whenever you have free time fixing these bugs you don't have to build anything else i just you know the code base you've worked with us before just please fix these bugs
And he agreed to it. And so that kind of got us in a slightly more stable place. And then I was just basically begging him to join full time. And he wouldn't because he had like a really high paying job that he was at and we couldn't beat that. But he told me that his cousin was interested in a full time job and that his cousin is also a great developer. And I just took his word for it. And his cousin joined.
And his cousin is still with us today. And that was like employee number one at Social Snowball. Wow. Like first full time. Yeah. And that was like three plus years ago, right? Yeah. You know how I often say it's hard work, luck, and skill? You kind of finally got lucky because you went through 20 devs and one of them was eventually good. Is that a little bit of what happened there? I mean, that's crazy odds of that, of his cousin.
being around with you that long, you know, after churning through so many. Yeah. I want to step back a second because I think we glossed over something that some listeners will hear and be like, wait, what? You said I partnered with some influencers. dot, dot, dot, got to 10K MRR in three months. Now, no one does that.
So here's what I want to do is like, what do you mean partner with influencers? Did you know? Did you already have a network of influencers? Like what's the, you know, could someone replicate this or was this only something you could do? And it was like 2019, right? It was like six years ago.
I just want to dig in a little bit on that so someone might understand how you got. Because even getting to 10K in three months is something. And even with a crappy product, at least you have some money to pay someone to do something at that point, right? Versus if you are at 1K after three months, maybe you'd have just punted on this whole thing. you know, after grinding for a year. So let's double click on that.
I would say, well, to answer your first question, it's absolutely something you can replicate today. Like I talked to another founder just a couple of days ago who is also selling a Shopify app.
and partnered with influencers and did really well with that. So I know it's something you can replicate. I definitely had a bit of an unfair advantage because I did know some of the e-commerce influencers that would be super relevant to talk about Social Snowball. And that was like the first few influencers. And then from there, I was just doing...
cold outreach like reaching out like getting people's emails from youtube and just reaching out but yeah i just asked these e-commerce these you know there's plenty of people on youtube that talk about e-commerce strategy and marketing and i just asked the ones that i know and then a few others to make a video about Social Snowball and to try the app and make a case study with it. Just very simple things like that.
and uh they it was mostly like youtube videos i think some people would post on instagram eventually tiktok i think this was before tiktok though and so yeah that first 10k mr just came strictly from those influencers got it and so Tell us how, I mean, obviously I can go to your site and look at your pricing, but when you have 10K MRR, that is brands that are paying you money, are they paying you like a monthly fee plus affiliate commissions, I'll put in quotes? Is that how your revenue works?
Sort of. So I mean, our pricing has changed a lot. Like we've iterated it probably like four or five times since then. But yes, like high level brands always pay us a monthly fee. We used to have more plans that do this. Now we only have like one starter plan that does this where we...
It's not that we're charging the affiliate commission because it's up to the brand. I mean, we have the software to do it, but the brand pays the affiliate commission directly through Social Snowball. We, on the starter plan, only take a percentage of affiliate revenue. Three percent. Yeah. Okay.
And you've also mentioned to me that you've listened to this podcast for many years. Do you remember when you started? Yes. It was actually in the very, very beginning, dude, like very, very beginning. One of the freelancers that I worked with that things didn't work out with said you should check out startups for the rest of us.
And I checked it out. And I kid you not, like from then until now, I maybe have missed one to three weeks ever. And I've listened to every week. And I'm not just saying this. I've told this to a lot of people. I say this behind your back. this podcast has helped me as a resource more than any other resource in the world period. It really has. So this is it. Yeah. So this is an exciting moment for me too.
Yeah, thanks, man. That's a really big deal. It's super meaningful to me because you know why I do this podcast now when I could just not? It's to help people. And if I can help you and maybe someday you... buy a book or you become a TinySeed founder or you invest in TinySeed or whatever, great. And you know what? If I'm just able to help you, that's cool too. And so, yeah, no, that's like super meaningful to hear, especially given the success you've had. So that's awesome. Speaking of.
Success in Tiny Seed. I can't ignore this. So in 2021, you applied to Tiny Seed. We interviewed you. I remember talking to you. And we rejected you. And this is one of, you know, I've told you this in the past, but... Venture capitalists have what they call their anti-portfolio. So if you say no, if Google pitched you and you said no to them, and Zuckerberg pitched you and you say no, you say, that's my anti-portfolio. I said, portfolio, I wish that I'd fund it.
With TinySeed, we really don't have an anti-portfolio. I think there's a couple companies that have come along that have gotten quite large that have been like, damn, we should have invested. But usually the signals at that point were not, they weren't great. And it was like, I don't regret saying no. But you are definitely at the top, one of the top of the list here in the end. Because doing five to 10 million and growing as fast as you are is just super.
super impressive. But my memory was that your churn, I think you said you applied to around 20K MRR, which is a great sweet spot for us. That's why we talked to you, and I'm sure you were growing because you were hustling. But I remember your churn being like really high and we were trying to, there's an influencer thing where it's like, ooh, is influencer space going to keep going? Is it really a thing? Again, this is.
four or five years ago. But also I think the churn was a big blocker. Do you have memories of all that going down? For sure. I remember talking to you and I was like super starstruck. And then you told me to calculate my churn. And I was like, oh, no, you asked me what my churn is. And I said, I have no idea where I even look to find that. Especially because we don't build through Stripe. We build through Shopify spelling API, which
At the time, nothing integrated with. Now there's a platform called Mantle, which is great. But at the time, there was literally nothing. So I remember I spent like, I think it was, I'm not even exaggerating, like two or three hours going through every single.
transaction and like all we had was this like raw transaction history of everything that's ever happened and i was like using a pen and paper and adding things up i don't even remember how i did it but i like figured out how to calculate churn literally by manually adding and subtracting or whatever. every single transaction. And then I got a number and it was something super high back then, like 10% or something.
So it makes sense that you rejected me, honestly. That is really high. It's a bummer. I do remember... I know when I ask in interviews about churn, and if someone doesn't know their churn, that's a weird signal to me as a SaaS founder.
The number one number I looked at as a founder is my MRR, because I just want to see it up under the right. And probably my number two number was churn. And so I knew it by heart all the time. And then I think it was higher than 10. I bet I could go back. I think it was probably... 15 or higher. And I remember being like, uh-oh, this could be an issue.
Hey man, water under the bridge. I would have probably said the same thing. Like that's really high. Like that is really high. It is. And here's the thing. Our signals, none of us are a hundred percent right. You just can't be, you know, you just gotta be right. I talk about this all the time as a founder, like do a bunch of.
and be right enough of the time that those ones win. And that's what it is. Just because we said no to you doesn't mean tiny seed doesn't work. And it also doesn't mean we make bad decisions. It means sometimes. We're not correct. Sometimes we can't see the future, you know, or sometimes the information presented doesn't match the filter that we have. I'm curious because now you built an incredible business. So you applied to TinySeed, you got rejected.
Was that discouraging to you or were you just like, hey, I'm going to do this anyways, whether they want to be on board or not? Yeah, I mean, I definitely was like a bit disappointed for sure. But I was just like, I mean, it is what it is. Like I can eat rejection all day. Like rejection is not going to slow me down. So I was just like, all right, onward we go. So, I mean, it was definitely a bit disappointing because I was a big listener of the podcast, but it wasn't going to stop me.
Didn't change the trajectory, and that's the best founders, right? Is when you're not waiting for permission. You're not waiting for someone to annoy you. Like, oh, you're going to succeed. Me investing in you means you're going to succeed, and me not means you're not going to. That's just not. True, as evidenced by your story. So flashing forward then, finally have a developer, full-time, first full-time employee, and you start to pivot up market. Why?
Honestly, it was just maybe partially from your podcast, just resources I was listening to in general just really made that sound like an appealing move. Also, the small segment of users that were a bit more upmarket for us were the best customers. Obviously, highest paying, lowest churn, easiest to deal with, just the basic stuff that you would expect. I've heard that before. Yeah. So yeah, it was kind of a realization I had at some point.
And at the time I was like, okay, there's probably a lot of things I need to do to make this a reality. And it was really a pivot of the entire business that honestly took about a year.
from like me realizing that and deciding like this is where we're going to go until I felt like okay we're actually in a place where we can work with these bigger brands more consistently so it's a combination of product right like the app had to have the features that these bigger brands expected so that was just like a slow
building a certain set of features. It was the pricing. We wanted to start pricing higher, but that was actually the last thing we did because we were like, let's build all the pieces of this and then increase pricing. Product, customer success strategy, I hired someone to be full-time.
just onboarding. I want someone hands-on talking to these brands, like really building a relationship and helping answer their questions, not just reactive chat support but like proactive onboarding and that was a big thing for us.
marketing as well like we were kind of relying on ads and influencers and the Shopify app store before and that's how the smaller brands were shopping for software we needed to find where the bigger brands were shopping for software and now we've really cracked that code and it's and we could get deeper into this but it's a combination of partnerships
events in person and online content marketing and then just like brand and community stuff like that's that's what's worked really well for us and that was a big learning curve as well Oh, and sales, like I started taking more sales calls and actually talking to brands before they would install. So all of those pieces had to like slowly be changed and none of these are overnight changes. Then once I felt like, okay, we're in a good place,
switched pricing. We made the starting plan at 100 a month at the time. It's higher now, but it was 100 a month at the time. And growth took off much faster at that point. That was a pivotal moment for Social Snowball. I want to call out something you said that I think some folks could miss.
There's a difference between raising your prices and going up market. Those are two different things. They can be the same, but a lot of times you are just underpriced for the market. You're charging $29, you can charge $49 to the exact same customer base, same positioning, same product.
That's not what you did. Going upmarket usually means a whole new customer set or subset that you have to, as you said, build features for, build a customer success org for, which in your case was one person, build a sales force. and then raise prices. It's complicated, and it can take a long time. In season one of Tiny Seed Tales, gather did this, and it took them, I think it was like 12 months, it may have even been 18 to get there, somewhere between 12 and 18 months.
And they thought it was going to be six, which of course you do. And then they get to the 12-month mark and they're like, we still don't have all the features the big brands needed. How did you have the conviction? to do that because to spend that much time and presumably that much money of your profit, you had to feel very convinced that was the right move. It was just from the data that we already had, we saw that these bigger brands were... Doing better also like affiliate marketing
Sometimes smaller brands, they just don't have the resources to get it off the ground. It's not something that you just turn on necessarily. It takes a bit of work, and the bigger brands had the resources. They had the influencers. It was easier for them to find influencers to work with. Or if they were running a customer ambassador program, then they had more customers to bring into the ambassador program. So everything just worked better.
for the bigger brands and that was pretty clear to me so i think that's kind of what gave me the conviction and then and maybe this is like a flaw but something that i still hold on to today is that we can be the affiliate platform for all kinds of brands so
I never felt like I was letting go of like the smaller brand segment. I just felt like we were also allowing us to play in this bigger league. And so today we run what you would refer to as a dual funnel where we have like a self-serve flow for the smaller brands.
I mean, it starts at 200 a month now, but that's a smaller brand for us now. And then we have like, you know, the sales led process for the bigger brands. And maybe if we were to shut off the self-serve, we would do better if we get focused. But I don't know, I kind of like the idea that we can support any kind of brand. So this next question is interesting. I'm trying to figure out exactly how to ask it. But really at the top level, it's like...
It sounds like you were right most of the time. Like aside from the tech. developer hiring issues, a lot of other things have gone really well. Like the early marketing, you got there quick. Even deciding on the idea, the execution on the idea, the marketing, the sales, then the going up market. There's a lot of things that went right. How did you do that? Like, how did you learn to do all this, right? You're 26 now and you manage a team of 24 people. You've never...
Worked a day job where you learned management skill. You know what I mean? Just a broader entrepreneur question. How did you execute on this as well as you did? I really think there's no secret to it. I think I just was learning as I went. And I was just trying to be a sponge and just absorb as much information as possible. So things like this podcast, other podcasts, just...
I had a couple of advisors that just gave me advice, almost like mentors, you could say. And then I would just fail all the time, just like the engineering stuff. We didn't even talk about what our engineering team is now, which I think we have like one of the best engineering teams literally possible. And to go to think about like where we were when I had no engineers, I just got back from Romania. I was like depressed.
My app was completely falling apart to the fact that we have a nine-person Northern California-based killer engineering team today. That is crazy, but that's only just from like aggressive trial and error. Just like trying, failing, trying, failing, trying, failing. Okay, I learned a little thing there. Trying, failing, trying, failing. Okay, now we got a little bit closer.
and I think I just applied that and everything and same with team building you're mentioning like managing a team of 24 the first 10 iterations of our team not just the engineering team but all teams didn't work like i hired the wrong people in every department i had to fire people people quit things didn't work out like this happened across
every part of the business i think the only thing that i had a good knack for that was relatively smooth was like the marketing and go-to-market stuff that was less bumpy but everything else was like Failing, failing, failing, failing, and then finally figuring it out. Doing a lot of things quickly and most of them worked out is what it sounds like eventually. Wow.
So I do want to hear this story about, you know, you said you have an incredible engineering org now, and I have a note here in 2024, which is last year. Hired my dream CTO is the quote, but how did this come about? It sounds like you're all locked in, Northern California engineering team. What, does that fall in your lap or what?
Okay, so I mentioned like our first full-time employee who was like that freelancer's cousin he's still with us today he's awesome but he basically helped us hire an engineering team so we hired a couple other engineers we ended up building a functioning engineering team like they weren't the best engineers in the world
but they were good enough, and we were moving along. We were slowly fixing that. Some things were still breaking. The app would still go down. Sometimes we were building new features, but we weren't. It wasn't like a complete disaster. At a certain point, I guess last year, probably early last year, I realized
this is not what's going to take us to the next level. And it started to feel like engineering and product became an anchor to the ship again. And while marketing, sales, partnerships, customer success, brand, community, everything else was just like... Sailing us forward like I could feel that anchor just like pulling us back
And so it wasn't that the engineering team was a disaster. It's just that it wasn't the level that I needed to be at the scale and that we were in what my ambitions, like what I wanted to accomplish. So I did what I usually do when I want to hire someone out of my league. I just literally went to LinkedIn, went to a lot of our competitors, some of our competitors, like the big legacy competitors, use our tech stack.
And I reached out to a lot of the most senior engineering titles that were either currently or previously at those companies. And maybe I reached out to 20 people, got like... five that were interested. And then this one guy was literally the most qualified person possible. He was the VP of engineering. The only reason he wasn't the CTO is because there was a technical founder there. So really like the top engineering leader.
literally our biggest legacy direct competitor that happens to also use our exact tech stack he joined he was the third engineering hire there and he exited during their series b when they had like 200 or 300 engineers. He built the whole org. He knew his stuff. He knew the product. He knew the space. He knew how to build a team. He knew everything. And we got along super well. And he was super excited to join and he joined. And then when he joined...
He brought on a lot of the top engineers that he worked with at this competitor as well and he knew who was really good and so now and they were all based in Sacramento because this company was based in Sacramento in person so we just have a bunch of really great engineers in Sacramento led by the CTO and it now like now I feel like we have like a great product and engineering team. I think this is what I've been dreaming of for the past five years. Yeah, it sounds like it.
Sounds like you kind of earned it. Like you did all the hard knocks to get there. As I hear your story, man, it feels to me, I'm curious what you think about this assessment. I'm going to name two things that I think might be your superpower. Is one of them that you just do not give up? And is the other one that you're not afraid of failure or rejection? I would say those are traits of mine. I would say my superpower though with this stuff is getting people on board with my mission.
I think I'm a great storyteller. I think I'm great at getting people excited. And it's not like I'm manipulating or being fake. I'm genuinely excited about what we're building and the path forward. And I think I just do a really good job at getting other people on board that mission. And I think that's how I've been able to hire talent. That's definitely it. like you know punching above our weight
Yeah. How do you do that? Because I'm a storyteller too, right? Whether on this podcast or just to my team or whatever. How do you get someone like that on board with your mission? Is it just that, well, yeah, I'm curious. Do you tell them a story? Are you like, this is where we're going. Join us if you can make it. What is in your head when you're doing that?
There's no concrete strategy. I literally just get on a call with them and I tell them, this is the problem we're solving. This is what we've done so far. And this is what we can do. This is where we're going. This is what we've achieved so far. And it's just... I think it's just my excitement. I think I just have contagious excitement when I'm convincing someone to join the mission. And I think that's really it. I don't think there's too much.
like actual strategy to it i think i just i'm very very clear on what we're doing and where we're going like to me the vision is crystal crystal clear so if they have questions or if they want to just learn about what we're doing like it's not like i have to sit and think i know exactly what we're doing why we're doing it where we're going what the future looks like in my mind at least
And I just, I get really excited when I talk about it because it's really exciting to me. And I think people just like that energy and they want to be able to build something cool. And this is their opportunity too. And these days, I mean, your growth has accelerated dramatically, obviously, if you've gone from... Give or take 20K MRR four years ago, and you're, as you said, approaching between 5 and 10 million. What's it like these days in terms of your growth trajectory?
So, I mean, recently it's been really strong. January and Q1 is always a little bit slow for Ecom because there's just like all the sale periods and Black Friday is over. So there's always a bit of contraction and churn there, but we're right back on track after that. And like, we're adding something like... 30K MRR a month on average right now. Yeah, I think past 30 days it's right around exactly 30K. And that's like new MRR expansion. Amazing. Congrats, man.
Hell of a business. I wish Tiny Seed could have invested, but here we are. Here we are. Noah Tucker, thanks for joining me on the show. Thank you for having me. This was awesome. If folks want to keep up with you, obviously they can go to socialsnowball.io to see what you're working on. Is there a particular social channel that you hang out on? Because it does not look like you're super active on an ex-Twitter.
I'm more of a consumer on extra Twitter. I used to post more, but I'm not like super active. But yeah, extra Twitter, I do check my DMs probably at least once a day. So that would be great. And also LinkedIn, I'm super active on both. So yeah, either would be fine. Awesome, man. Thanks again. Thanks for having me. Thanks again to Noah for joining me on the show. And I realized that Noah actually is active on X Twitter. He is N-O-A-T-U-C-K. Noah.
I know Noah and Social Snowball have great things ahead, and I appreciate him joining me on the show to share what really is a pretty incredible story. Thanks to you for listening this week and every week. This is Rob Walling signing off from episode 17.