EE 352 - Why I Spent €500,000 on a Domain Name - Peter Coppinger - The Teamwork Story

So when we were organizing a get-together for all our staff from all over the world, which we started a couple years ago, I decided, oh, we were gonna call it the Grand Council, and I don't know if anyone knows where that comes from, but Lord of the Rings, the Grand Council of Elrond. We're just nerds. So, yeah, we had our Grand Council last week. We had staff in from all over the world and they were out in every pub in Cork City tearing it up all week and we use it to kind of solve challenges.

We bring customers in, we've been partners in it's really good fun, but we ultimately it's to solve challenges and to move the business faster and to get us all aligned and it worked and we'd one of the best ones ever it is a random question to start with, but there's a reason to my madness.

He wanted to get away from the office and I rented an office in the hotel and we locked ourselves away and we had a really, really good think about it and we picked some employees and we're like that's the type of behavior we want to model and we came up with our values and we hire and fire according to those values.

We're getting things done, but are just toxic to other employees. And we decided, yeah, we are, we're going to follow through whatever it takes. We're going to try and have a good environment and also like um, we don't like this thing that we're a family, because we're not a family. You know we're. We're colleagues who work together. We want to respect and treat each other well, but we're not. We have a lot of thinking about that sort of thing. The culture we want.

We also want people who move fast and are agile and don't get stressed, and stress is going to happen in the workplace. It's inevitable. So one of our kind of key rules is don't let things fester. So we do this thing with all our staff. We've coffee with founders and we go through our values, because it's one thing to read them in a book. It's another thing to actually hear directly from the founders why we came up with these values and what they mean to us.

And, like you know, we have a couple of golden rules. So the number one golden rule is don't be a dick, right. We've got feedback that kind of doesn website right, probably won't put it on that is actually one of our golden rules. The second golden rule is don't leave things faster. So like something's. It's inevitable in any organization. Something's gonna piss you off your boss, your work, the new rules, you'd miss the pay rise, whatever. But don't leave it faster.

You have to have it out, and it's easy to say that it's really hard to do, and so we keep reminding people only things faster, because these tiny little things become huge issues in your own head when you leave them faster. What's?

One of the things along the way is we learned about one-to-ones and what an effective tool they are for this sort of thing. Um, one-to-one with your team leader, your manager, is critical and it's the employees meeting, not the team leads meeting or the managers meeting, and it's the chance for the employee to talk about the career and to talk about things that are festering for them. And if that doesn't work, they can always come to myself and Dan. Our door is always open.

And there's another third golden rule, and I'll just tree. And the third golden rule is never, ever, ever, ever argue over any sort of text medium or even give negative feedback over text medium. I like that All right, because myself and Dan used to have blazing rows over silly shit, right, like I'd make a link blue and I'll come back the next day and he's turned it to red and we'd have a fucking blazing row over silly shit, right?

And uh, what we found over the years is if we, if we were, if we gave each other abuse over an email or over text or over chat, it just all was flared up out of control. If we actually just talk to each other and be like I think you're a bit of a dick because you overwrote my work yesterday, and he'd be like, oh, I didn't mean that, it all was a thing of nothing. So it's so important to us. And we've seen this pattern again and again and again. And you see it in your personal lives.

You send a message to your sister or your cousin or whatever, and you wrong, and suddenly it goes from naught to 100, you know. So pick up the phone, jump on a zoom call and it's a firing offense. It's that serious, it's a firing offense if you're not taking this seriously.

So if you're there in a you know reviewing someone's repo or you know you're, you're just giving someone abuse on chat, or even if it's just being overly negative, just pick up the phone and it's a much harder and braver thing to do. And if you can't, if you can't do it in real time, just send you, send a video. So I've done this. I mean, we all slipped through the cracks every now and again, like our bugs got out of control at one stage and I got, I got really angry and I sent it.

I sent a chat message going fucks, if bugs are african, out of control, this is ridiculous. And next day I said, lads, sorry, I was just like really stressed. You know, at the time I shouldn't have done that. So next time it happened, I recorded the video. I said, look, guys, I just found these two bugs. They're really bad, you know. And like our book concept 180, we've, you know, we agreed we try and keep it under this amount. Um, you know, please, please, can we start this out?

And that was received so much better. And a culture is a thing that, um, you're never done with. We're always working on it out and, like, ceo is kind of chief culture officer, I think really have to take the lead. So anything that affects the mojo of the company has to pass through myself or my co-founder. So, for example, if the people team try introducing a new policy actually this is an interesting one. At one stage somebody brought two Huskies into the office.

We love dogs in the office, right. Somebody brought in there two giant Huskies and we've just kind of green artificial grass area at the back, and then there was about five other dogs in the office and anyway they all went out the back and, as it turns out, the two Huskies shit everywhere, right. And everyone's like we need a dog policy, we need a dog policy. This is like how about we don't have a dog policy?

How about we just apply common sense, going ahead and actually that's one of our things as well we try to rally against. Um, it's natural in a company. As a company gets bigger, bureaucracy creeps in and everyone's like we need this rule, we need that rule, we need to do this thing, we need a policy for this. And we're like let's go as far as we can with common sense and we'll, we'll implement policies, you know, as a last resort if we have to. So I know, I think, I think it's.

It's a huge part of my job.

The local enterprise offices have everything to help make it happen for your business. And if there's one thing that entrepreneurs want aside from more money, it's more time. The local enterprise offices want to give that back. Their supports for competitiveness and productivity can help your business save time, money and energy. For them it's all in a day's work.

So if you want to give your business the gift of time, decreased costs and lower electricity bills, then go to allinadaysworkie, take two minutes to fill out the form and let your local enterprise office handle the rest. If you've been listening for a while, know iconic offices have been my partner for ages. Now, working and recording out of their flexible workspaces has meant a huge deal to the success of this podcast.

So it made perfect sense to partner up with them again for season 17, but to give you, my fellow entrepreneurs, a unique offer come work in the iconic office workspaces for free, with no catches. Simply visit the link in the description below and enter Gary24 for a free day pass or a free day office pass. Enjoy. How do you keep it front of mind as you grow, Because you've grown into a huge company now. How do you?

You got to run it past me Because you know sometimes they just go too bureaucratic or they miss the original intent of it or they miss that. You know we have a culture here and a history and rituals are actually very important that we maintain rituals in the company, the Grand Council or whatever it is. What are your rituals, okay?

That ritual keeps everyone up to date. There's loads. There's rituals. On every team there's a leadership team. There's what we call an L10. Every team there's a leadership team. There's what we call an L10 meeting. Every week it's a 90 minute meeting for the leadership team every single week. It never goes a minute over 90 minutes. It happens the same time every week the start of every meeting where we've got a team of people together, we spend the first five minutes doing a personal update.

So what we do is we go around and we say, hey, what's going on in your life? And you might say, oh, I went kayaking at the weekend. Yeah, that's good, I didn't know you were into kayaking. Next person says I'm actually really stressed at the moment because I put my mother into a nursing home. You're like, yeah, I didn't know that, and we go around. Everyone shares something, but, holy shit, it deepens our relationships with each other. It becomes such a richer work environment.

So I do that now in board meetings. So in our board meetings, which are usually really stuffy affairs, right, I force them. Now I do my CEO update and I'm like, right, let's do the ritual. We go around the table and it's unbelievable the connection it brings. It turns out that these investors are actually humans and they love their kids and shit. Who knew? So we're much closer to them now and have a much better relationship.

We rarely come up with our own great ideas, but we hear, we read and we learn and we listen. And whenever we hear a great idea, we're like that's a great idea, we're going to assimilate that into teamwork. So we're constantly robbing ideas that are going to improve our culture or help us move faster.

Uh, we'll expect you to think like an owner and act like an owner is the flip side of that. So that trust is important. Um, so it was smooth sailing, mostly for us now that we're back. Um, well, actually we had this interesting strategy.

We have a beautiful office in cork and we had a beautiful office in Belfast and we had this really cool strategy of telling people in Dublin hey, come escape the rat race, you'll earn the same money, you'll get to work on really interesting stuff and you get to work in this beautiful office and it was brilliant. For years, we had all these people coming out of Dublin. They were, you know, so when they got married and they were thinking about kids and stuff. They wanted to escape the rat race.

We even had this cool website escape the corkie with this animated graphics and all this, and we were showing how much cheaper and better everything is, and it was a brilliant strategy. And then COVID fucked it. So now we're the same as everyone else, everyone's remote, and we don't have that thing anymore. And now we've got these expensive offices and nobody's coming in. So when you go to our office and at any given day now, it's a ghost town.

We've been debating should we mandate everyone back in, and it doesn't feel like us to do that, so we're kind of leaving it at the discretion of the team leads at the moment. But we're bribing people in Tuesdays and Thursdays. So what we do is we do catered lunches in the office Tuesdays and Thursdays, and the car park's full every Tuesday and Thursday and it's great to see a bit of life back in the office.

I met this girl in the office and I was like hey, it was Jane. I said Jane, that video. I happened to watch this video you did a couple weeks ago last night. It's amazing, you came across brilliant. She's like thank you so much. And as we were walking away I said by the way, are we releasing that thing? She's like yeah, it's ready to go whenever you want it. I said gotcha, sure, let's go. So that like 30 second interaction.

If you have a sales team you need a high energy environment where you know when you win the big sale you can turn around your colleagues and be like, yes, I just landed, you know, 50 grand deal. We have a big gong in the office, you know, and the rule is if you land anything over 50,000 you can go bong and it's, it's a bit of crack and people hear it in the background and stuff. But you can't recreate that energy remote.

So at the moment our sales team are required, I think, by their manager, come in three days a week and our support team required to come in four days a week. But the rest of the company is kind of free, I think. I think you can't mandate people to be in the office full-time either. I mean driving for an hour, just people that drive for an hour to get to work and drive an hour to get home and doing that every single day is just wasteful and madness.

And, by the way, as a society, I think it's just ticked that we all just leave. As a society, we all exit out of our houses at the exact same moment. It blows my mind Create chaos and then we're all stressed, and then we're all stressed and then we all leave our offices at the same time, cause chaos and stress and crashes and everything. We've got to figure out ways as a society that we stagger it over a couple of hours now. I personally never travel during rush hour.

I go in like 10 am or whatever.

I was fascinated. I begged my mother to get us one. She did my, you know it was between me and my two sisters. My two sisters hated it. They sold me their shared computer for two slices of toast um good deal. They got nothing for christmas that year. Um, and I taught myself the pro. I mean, what was cool about computers back then? It came with a little manual. You're like what after you're finished, after you're finished playing the games? You're like what is this thing?

And you're kind of poking through it. And you're like, if I type in this thing, this ball starts bouncing around the screen. You're like, how did that make that happen? And I was just fascinated and hooked. Fast forward, two years later there was an Irish PC mag magazine. I think it was. PC live or something. And they had a little disc in the front of it and there were shareware games and stuff where you know you got a taste of game and you could mail order the rest of the game.

So I started sending them in my games and, lo and behold, like you get 10 levels of some really crappy game. I mean they're crap like, but you know, I'd be like you know if you finish the game, if you, when you finish the 10 levels, say, hey, if you want to get 100 levels, send five pounds to this address, right. And next thing there's all these envelopes landing in the door and after about a month of this my mother was like what the fuck is this about?

What are all these envelopes coming in the door? And I was like, you know, I was locked away in my bedroom and I'm like, oh yeah, that's, I'm just selling software. Her mind was blown, blown away.

But one time this lady wrote me like a really nice letter and it was like you know she, you know she, I'm so impressed that you're a 12-year-old and you're doing this and it's such a good man and here's an extra fiver for you and it was lovely and I kept that for years and I lost it now but I should have kept it forever, but it was cool. I was always couldn't wait to get to college. Wasn't what I expected? People in my class had no interest in software what?

I was miles ahead, um, and then the internet started happening right around this time and websites and all this, and I was fascinated, learned how to make websites and stuff. And then I started going around to every pub and restaurant in Cork City saying, hey, would you like a website? And they'd be like what A website? What's is that, that WW internet thing? And so you'd have to explain what a website is right. And you know most of them told me get lost. One asshole said what's your VAT number?

The other guy right, this other guy was going around town doing the exact same thing, right. Well, he heard about me, I heard about him. We're mortal enemies straight away. And I wonder, like that was a brick, you know? And I'm on the number eight bus out to college and like in distinct rings, and it's some B&B in the Western Road wants to talk. I'm on the way out to exam, but I'm like, fuck the exam, I'm going to meet in the B&B.

And it turns out it's a prank call from that asshole, right, I love it Fucking winding me up. I love his style. So we meet. Some mutual friend introduced us in college one day and we're like mortal enemies and it's Dan, my co-founder. Right Within 30 seconds of talking to Dan, we were kindred spirits.

Really, we were like he was the only other guy passionate for game programming, same thing, wanted to find entrepreneurship and programming and create big things and do great things, and that's literally how we met. It's kind of cool story, eh.

We called the company digital crew. There was another co-founder, cormac, and we were just up the road here by the gpo we got an office. I think that was our second office, listening to the echo guy all day long, sort of cranking out websites. From there we started doing. Someone asked us to make an e-commerce website. I literally wrote an e-commerce website in c++, which is not the easiest thing in the world to do. I don't know if that means anything to anyone, but it's fucking hard.

And then from there we got a lucky break. We met someone in Pfizer who said hey, could you come down and do a pitch for this internal project? They had an incumbent software supplier that did custom software for them that they were really pissed off at. And they had a new project and they asked them to bid on it and asked us to bid on it and like they were probably, you know, 30, the other guys were probably 30,000. We were like we'll do it for 500 quid.

So we got the gig and we put our heart and soul into it and we knocked it out of the park and from then on we had infinite projects from Pfizer Wow and projects from Pfizer Wow and we really scaled up and we spent probably six or eight years as a consultancy. Did that switch your focus? Yeah, I think it was a huge distraction. It's a great way, I think, to start off your entrepreneurial journey, because you've got to create a brand, You've got to create service, You've got to learn how to pitch.

You've got to learn how to do tenders. You've got to get your pricing right. Right, you gotta learn how to interact with humans, which you know. If your developer isn't a natural skill, you learn how to. You know we made all the mistakes we had. We weren't. We got screwed by one person. We weren't taking stage payments. We were like dude, delivered a project and get paid. And as a project got bigger. One time we got stung for 40,000 worth of work.

The person literally fired one person, fired another person and wouldn't pay for the work. So you learn along the way to not do these things, take stage payments, to not interact with 20 people. We became a well-run services company. We doubled our prices, got even more, we got less busy and more profitable because we were the hamster in the wheel, like just running, running, running, running and we weren't making progress. And the third co-founder just said fuck this, I'm going to Australia.

And it was just myself and Dan looking at each other going what are we doing? We're working so hard and we're not making money. So we like doubled our prices and none of our customers even flinched. They were like, yeah, we were wondering when you'd figure this out. Anyway, we did work for Aldi for little. We got really into the application space doing all these applications and we had really great customers, lots of university customers. How'd you grow it?

But this is the thing, right, Like you're the hamster in the wheel and you can make the wheel bigger, but it's bloody hard. We always wanted to be product guys and we had a few small products along the way, but they were never gonna be more than 100 grand or 200 grand. They weren't going to be big. We're always looking for that breakthrough product.

But as Digital Crew became bigger and teamwork kind of took off at around the same time, it was just a huge distraction, the gaming cafe. So eventually we just left it go. But how teamwork started is we had all these projects going on for our consultancy and we had a whiteboard in the corner of the office where we listed all the projects, how much there worked.

You know, we had a little kind of red we'd stickers kind of for who's screaming the loudest, what the next milestone is, what the priorities are, and we did a review of this every Monday morning and it was like geez, there has to be a better way to run a services company than this. How long were you out? We were probably at it for at least six years at that stage, maybe seven, oh yeah, so no, we heard there was this.

There was a couple of new online project management apps and the biggest one that was kind of famous. We'd heard of it. We said we'll give it a go and after using it for a week, we're like man, this thing's so basic, like literally all you can do is put in projects, put in tasks and mark them as done. There's no subtasks, you can't attach a file to a task, there's no milestones, you can't assign tasks to multiple people. Uh, there's no due dates. And the whole thing was like so basic.

We were turning out sophisticated applications for Pfizer, for Lilly, for all these guys, every day of the week and this stuff was child's play to us. We're like we could do it better than this. What year is this? Right? But the thing that really nudged us to do it was I sent a support request to the company and I said hey, guys, we're really struggling. Is there any chance that you have due dates and file attachments coming in the next few months?

And they sent back such a shitty, shitty response. Now, we'd always been really customer centric. We always went the extra mile, we've been over backwards and you know we we do whatever it takes to keep the customer happy was kind of a mantra and mindset. And then I got this email and it was so ignorant, be one thing I've just said, look, I'm really sorry, we're not gonna do it. But but they were like we're never going to do it and we don't really care about your problems.

They're your problems, not ours, kind of attitude. It was just reeking of attitude and it just pissed me off. And I remember going home and I lay awake all night thinking about this going fuck these guys. I came into we met every morning for coffee. Again, I met Dan in the morning. I was like hey, I've been up all night thinking about this, we're going to take these guys on. He's like let's do it Fast forward.

Three months later we hadn't done a line of code on it because we were so busy with the client work. If this thing's ever going to actually happen, we're going to have to treat ourselves like a client. So that was kind of like work on our product. So we did all the client work. Monday, you know, made a bit less money, but Monday to Thursday we had a staff probably 20 by then, right? So it was just myself and Dan would work on this every Friday, and we couldn't wait for Friday to come around.

We'd be in there first thing in the morning tearing into the product, then we'd work Saturday and Sunday and all Sunday night, and then we'd come in Monday morning.

We had an internal bit of software called Teamwork CRM and I don't even know why we call it Teamwork CRM. So when it came to naming our project management product, it was just like, yeah, we're calling it Teamwork, teamwork, project Manager. So we launched it with teamworkpmnet Like the worst domain name in the world. But somehow, two days later we got our first sale. Where did it come from? Some lady stumbled. So this is the thing. Back then you could be found on Google.

If you launched anything, there wasn't as much competition and somebody would search it and you'd show up in the search results. Do you remember what year this was we were? They would just search project management and they would find us in the list.

We're delighted with ourselves, since $50 recurring right, but $50 recurring is $600 a year. If you can keep them, it's all right. But then we got another sale. And then we got another sale and we wired it up so that in the office which is again just up the road by the GPO, every time we got a sale we had Homer Simpson will go pizza money.

For more information, check out your Local Enterprise Office on localenterpriseie and see how they can help your business today. Now back to the episode.

And then it got to the point where it was like pizza money was happening every single day, and then it was happening twice a day, and then it was happening like this. It's all organic, all organic. You weren't really pushing it yet, yeah so back to Google, right, you could be listed like Google. Now is all ads right and it's kind of pay to play and you have to have deep pockets to play in any of these markets.

It wasn't the case back then, Like you could be scrappy startup and you would be listed on page one or page two and you'd get found. I mean, rarely do people go to page two and they kind of look at the ads and the ads used to be on the side.

It was awesome, but like we had to turn it off first of all problems. So then we're in a situation where we we started working two days a week in our product, then we started working three days a week in our pride. Now we're like how do we get? We've all got all these customers, but we don't really want to do it.

How do we get from these customers and you know we don't want to drop the ball, or you know we've had them for years but how do we get to work on this full thing, full time, that's our passion. So we said we tried running the two businesses in parallel. That was a mess, didn't work at all. Why not? We actually found a guy. There was a guy who worked for us and we said, hey, don't say his name, but could you run this part of the business for us?

And he's like yeah, sure, and like, well, you know, we'll give you a share of the profits and everything else.

And he was like yeah, yeah, he's staring at the screen. He was watching fucking Judge Judy I'll never forget it while he's meant to be working. Maybe this was the problem, it's probably the first sign yeah. But we said if we could get the business to 30,000 MRR, I think we thought there's enough money coming in that we can safely kind of get out of the 30,000 monthly recurring revenue 30,000 monthly recurring revenue. It was kind of magic fear. In hindsight I think that was too high.

I think we probably could have made the shift at 10. We probably waited too long or too cautious, safe, maybe. Why do you reckon?

But I, we eventually found a company in Cork that we had done some work with, previously called granite study, and we said to these they were services company just like us. We said, hey guys, would you take our business? And they're like yeah, of course we will. How much do you were a services company just like us? We said, hey guys, would you take our business? And they were like yeah, of course we will. How much do you want for it? And we're like, no, no, just take it, just take it.

And they're like, no, I have to give you something. We're like, no, just, all we ask is that you don't drop the ball with these customers. That's it. Just do't drop the ball. We knew that this thing was going to be big for us Right the product so like services, business.

They did an unbelievable job and today they're Ireland's biggest digital agency and they're now branching out into New York and everything else and they're doing fantastic. That's cool. I think that's kind of cool. So then we were able to go full-time at Teamwork. The next major milestone is we started out this awful domain problem, so teamworkpmnet.

We'd reached out to the guy who owned teamworkcom, we'd sent him an email you can track down their email address and it was just somebody squatting on it and we'd send an email saying, hey, we'd like to discuss purchasing the domain. And then you just get back literally an email with a link and you're like what's this? And you click it and it take you to a website and it lists all these one word domain names that have sold for obviously millions.

So remember insurecom 25 million, petscom 20 million, sexcom, 16 million. And we're just like, all right, we get the idea and there's a list of 20 of these, so us off, basically right but one day.

And the guy instantly shot back an email must be in America. With three words that I'll never forget Same lowball offer. And I was like what a dick. Did you know?

I'm getting nervous just hearing this story I rang my wife my now wife and I said she knows I'm out drinking. I just said I just bought something for half a million euro and she's like come home immediately. So then I come home from work the next day and she's like did you tell him? Did I tell my co-founder, dan? And I'm like I couldn't do it. I bottled it All day. I was trying to find the perfect opportunity to talk to Dan.

And, as expected, both the CFO and Dan were like I don't know man, it's all our money. I don't know what. I mean, we could get two Maseratis instead. And he's like I don't know man. And I knew this would be the reaction. Why?

But in a couple of years time, the guy could be looking for 40 million or 20 million again. This opportunity may pass us by and may never come again. And co-founder Dan thought about it for 10 seconds. He said, fuck it, let's do it. We did and it was the best thing we ever did. There's something in SaaS called the long, slow SAS ramp of debt.

So it's like companies start and you're just on the slow growth trajectory and they have no breakthrough kind of moments that propel them forward and they're all just tipping away and like they're never. Just, most companies don't break past 2 million, don't break past 5 million.

When we launched this, we launched in January 2011 and all the changes are domain name and it hockey stick their road, literally hockey stick on the strength of the domain name alone, because you think about what it gives us.

It gives us like a that one word, calm, gives you instant credibility and you can imagine, you imagine two people talking in a bar and they're like, hey, we use this product, work what's called teamwork, pm, net or digs, a teamwork calm, which one you're gonna have more credibility and what you're gonna remember in the morning and which one you're going to remember in the morning and know where to go and know that it's something in tech.

So, just on that alone, one of the things we always used to get as a startup is like, how do we know you guys are going to be around in three years time, especially when you're an unfunded?

You don't need to be a genius for it, but there's something beautiful about getting the algorithm out of your head and seeing something magical happen on the screen that influences millions of people around the world. And you made it happen. The whole thing is beautiful.

We did background checks and bit of googling, I should say, to figure out the disguise, real and everything, and he seemed pretty legit. Do you ever find out how much he bought it for? Oh, he bought it for like $20. Like this is the fucking sickening thing. Alright, there was a time when I was in college when there was all these people that's just buying domain names and I was like this is ridiculous yeah like they're never going to make money.

Even though that was madness in hindsight. We should have focused on the one, right. But we built a help desk, product Teamwork Desk. I went to New York and I worked literally 12, 14 hours a day, constantly heads down, in code, developed this product more or less solo. Towards the end I got two guys in to kind of help me with the thing. But, like, we worked unbelievably hard and we emerged six months later with this lovely product and had a great time in New York as well for the six months.

But I met Oceana in there. I was there actually Incredible guy, good guy, but it was really good fun, I loved it, it was brilliant. But when I came back to Ireland after six months, the business was on fire. There was all these communication problems, culture problems, lack of alignment, little issues that are crept in all over the place.

People didn't know where we're going, what the vision was, and I kind of like, after observing this for a couple weeks, I had the epiphany oh shit, I'm the CEO. I'm the CEO, but I'm the CEO and title only. I'm like I've been acting like a developer and that's why there's these fires all over the place, and I think that epiphany had to happen or we would have gone nowhere. I realized that if I don't actually change my mindset and actually be the CEO the company needs, that we're going nowhere.

So I kind of down tools for a while and figured out what our biggest problems are. As I said, business is nothing more than solving problems Solving your biggest problem one after another, figuring out what your problems are, thinking about them, putting creative solutions in place solving them.

I think if you're an entrepreneur and you don't want to read books, by the way, you should just give it up and go get a day job. I once, I think I'll tell you this or on a one-time at an entrepreneur who said I'll do whatever it takes to be successful, whatever it takes, whatever it takes, and he asked me some basic questions. I was like you should read this book. Yes, another base because you should read this book. Yes, another basic question against masters, but you should read this book.

And he's like man, I don't like reading books. I was just done with that guy. Or if I give advice to a startup and I say you should read this book and I meet them six months later and they haven't read the book, they're dead to me.

I suppose when we bought to the main name as well, we had enough money coming in every month to cover our expenses. So it wasn't that we were going to be stuck the following month, even if we emptied our rank account, and that's the way we operated. We just operated as a profitable bootstrap company forever. And then, over the years, the project management space became saturated. I mean, there's 545 project management apps now.

What, yeah, and there's something like I'm guessing, but I would easily guess that there's 20 billion investment invested in this entire space. So the places have become saturated. There's loads of competing products and there's products that have come out of nowhere. From our perspective, have gone from zero to a hundred million in no time and we're kind of like, we're kind of looking at each other going you know, should we take money?

And every morning we'd be in the pub and we'd be like, should we raise money? And we're like, no, fuck it, investors are evil. I once told a room full of investors in Dublin that they're all evil and I will never take investment. And we took investment two years ago and they're all evil and I will never take investment. And we took investment two years ago. And the reason we did that is exactly this.

We're like, you know, we only we only get one shot at this and we don't want to be looking back where we regret again and we also think there's an opportunity. We kind of decided to niche down to service companies. Instead of being project management for everybody and every type of company in the world, we said we were looking at who are our best customers like they're all service companies.

Instead of being project management for everybody and every type of company in the world, we were looking at who are our best customers like they're all service companies, which makes sense because we built them. And what do you mean when you say service companies? What was that? Professional services any company that charges by the hour or by the project. So you got law firms, it service firms, web developers, all of the above Professional services.

So that category loves us, and always did, and we're like they keep asking us for these interesting features that are kind of very kind of niche right, such as budgets or retainers or recurring work or profitability analysis or, just think, all utilization rates. You have these staff and your kind of job is to utilize them as much as possible, so you're kind of aiming for a 70 or 80% utilization rate.

Yeah, there's all this stuff that the rest of the project, the rest of the world, doesn't care about. Yeah, so we focused on this and by listening to our customers, we kind of evolved from project management app to a psa professional services automation app and we realized that in this space there's nobody really doing a great job of giving service companies what they need, and we were like we could actually be the guys to own this.

We could be really big if we nailed this, and that is the thesis behind the investment. The other thing is, I think when you're self-funded, you can get so far, and I think it's definitely the way people should go. By the way, I'll come back to that. But there's a point at which you're not going to get the best people in the world working for you as a self-funded company. So, for example, we now have an amazing sales guy, amazing head of sales. He's unbelievably good.

He's got the office in Denver, charles over world. He's an inspirational leader and he gets shit done. He's unbelievable. There's no way he would have worked for a bootstrap company not a chance. Because, because he wants an exit, he wants to make millions. So to get someone like that to join you, they'll only join a funded company and they want skin in the game and they want to know that there's some sort of chance of a liquidity event in the future.

You kind of reach these ceilings where you kind of feel like you need some kind of shake-up to get to the next level. You know, be it the dot-com or putting in a sales team or solving your West Coast problem, but there's always kind of a cliff and it just felt like the next evolution to push us through.

It was brilliant because I just stayed at home. Zoom call, next Zoom call, next Zoom call, next Zoom call. We did these fireside chats. So we, like I, did 50 fireside chats. You kind of like there's a process where you suck them in. You do these kind of teaser chats and then you know that whittles the 50 down to say 40 express interest, and then they're probably talking about you internally in the company at that stage. So then from 40, you do a kind of deep demo.

So you've got to do loads of kind of deep demos and let them ask questions and then from there they've got to express interest and then there's a kind of more formal process where it is before business, after how much?

So you might have the best product in the world, but it's not about the best product in the world, but best product world with distribution. So that's another reason why funding kind of becomes essential. You need to break through that noise and have differentiated marketing. It's a whole interesting topic in itself. How long did it take to raise?

Dez and Owen had a very different experience to me. They're a unique group. Yeah, people thrown cash at them back then, I think. But I was convinced that we had to get a banker, got a banker. In hindsight, the process is fairly simple. We probably could have done it ourselves. I think if we were doing it now, we could probably run that process fairly easily myself. Now that I know how it works, I don't think the banker does anything that magical, if I'm honest.

Sorry, bankers, if you're watching this, what did it feel like that when he closed 50 million, like that's a well, here's the interesting thing when you raise, when you raise money the first time you raise serious money, you are an idiot. If you don't take 20%, that's the first thing. So for years people were kind of like in the industry we're wondering what's the done thing? Does it look bad? If I take money? It absolutely.

I can tell everyone in this room if you ever raise money, take 20% for yourself. You deserve it and they'll actually respect you more for knowing the right thing to do. And if you don't do it, you'll never again get a chance to take that money out of the company because you have other shareholders out. So you get one chance at doing that right and they will respect that you know what you're doing.

So we were always myself and Dan were always going to take 20% of the $50 million and in the end we got offered $70 million and they said you can still have 20%. I was like holy shit, I like this. So, yeah, we took the $70 million. Now, ray Nolan said this when he was on the podcast you should probably never celebrate raising money. You know it's a moment. It's good you achieved what you want to achieve, right.

But actually the world of pain starts then because you're now on a timer, they want to return within X years, they have a guaranteed return and you've got to scramble, you've got to deploy that capital. You've got to scramble, you've got to deploy that capital, you've got to get going and you can easily make mistakes. I mean we definitely made mistakes. We hired really fast, we definitely got some hiring wrong and we had to backpedal and undo the mistakes.

I met the CEO of a company called Sisense, a really, really powerful guy, amir a couple of months ago and one of the things we got wrong along the way is got some of our hiring wrong or our executive hiring wrong. If you get that wrong, you get the wrong executive hire. They have the wrong next level higher and that's wrong next level higher and it's one mess and you have to undo it right.

And we got funding probably left to go to our head a bit, probably probably went too fast and we had to undo some of that. So there's lessons learned. Amir was saying to me the level of detail he goes into when he's hiring the executive. He explained it to me one night in a bar up at SAS Society last year and I was blown away. It was a masterclass on how to do executive hiring the right way, and he would rather nobody in a chair than the wrong person in a chair.

Anyway, lessons were learned along the way.

So like there's just not enough sass companies coming out of Ireland and and I think SaaS software is eating the world right, and SaaS software software as a service within that is eating the world the most. I observed that there's just not enough SaaS companies coming out of Ireland. Why I would love to change that. I think it's mindset, it's ecosystem, it's support, it's systems, it's there's loads right, it's not leverage or diaspora. I think there's so much more we can do.

If you compare us to Israel, israel are only Israel are about the same size. They're a little bit bigger than us. I think they have eight million people. We have 5.2 million people and they are known as the startup capital of the world Startup nation. There's books written on how amazing their ecosystem is.

They are pumping out thousands of startups like serious amount of startups and they're taking over the world and their companies are going big and they're staying big and they're staying based in Israel and they're contributing unbelievable amounts to the economy there and, like us, they're an island nation. What I mean by that is all their neighbors want to kill them so they can't sell to their neighbors, right, and they have nothing going for them.

They have no natural resources, but yet they realized back in the 80s that we got to create an ecosystem here that is going to generate wealth, and they put a lot of smart systems in place and my theory is that in in general, I like to copy what works on trying to invent what works. I mean, there's a model there that works. I think there's smart things they did. We know to copy everything they did is that just not didn't get everything right.

And I'm not saying they're I like all their policies or anything, but I think they got a lot right on the entrepreneurial side of things that we should copy as a nation so what are the couple of key things you didn't install straight away couple of key things you'd install straight away. Couple of key things. One of the big things is so Enterprise Ireland do a good job. They deserve a lot of credit.

I'm not going to bash Enterprise Ireland at all they've been good to us but I think the model is wrong. I think the model of taking equity in companies in exchange for an investment is just the wrong model. So what they do in Israel instead is they have the innovation authority that does loans and they get 8,000 applications for loans a year and they grant 3,000 of them.

And as long as you're something in kind of high tech, they will give you a loan almost no questions asked, and the loans are such a low interest rate that doesn't have to be paid back immediately that it creates this environment where people will just give things a go, just startups spinning up all the time, and then, from an investment point of view, investors can easily buy out the government's low interest loan.

So an investor can invest in five companies and then the ones that look like they're working out, they can buy out the government's investments and double down on different companies. So it creates this like frenzy of an ecosystem where there's all these ideas, and I think that's what we need to make as a nation, because at the moment, like Enterprise Ireland, are kind of like vetting different ideas and saying that sounds like a good idea or that doesn't sound like a good idea.

That's not the ecosystem we need. We should just create an ecosystem where, like, there's all these crazy ideas that are just given a chance because, you know, dropbox sounded like a crazy idea back in the day and Airbnb sounded like a stupid idea, like nobody would have funded that shit and look where it is now. Right, we need to just create this environment where these crazy ideas can thrive. And actually I'll go further than that.

I think we have to go right back to the schools so, like we don't teach entrepreneurship in schools at all, like it should be part of the fucking curriculum and I'll probably get killed for this, but I I would swap irish for entrepreneurship any day of the week in my book, probably get murdered for that. But um, we, I think we need to teach entrepreneurship in schools and we need to teach programming in schools.

And one of the key things I would love to get across to girls in particular I have two young girls, six and five. I think girls should know that. 50,. The original programmer was Ada Lovelace was. The original programmer was a girl and up to 1984, I believe, 50% of all programmers were girls.

And then something happened that there's charts I've seen where like the amount of girls who were programmers just dropped off a cliff from 1984 on and there's this mindset that programming is a job for the boys, not for the girls. I mean, we can turn that on its head as a nation, but we've got to bring it right back to the schools and we've got to inspire.

So I think we need to teach that entrepreneurship is a viable tech entrepreneurship in particular is a viable career path and it's where you can make serious money and you don't have to be a nerd like me to do it right. You just have an idea. You can work in the ecosystem, you can work in sales, you can work in marketing. But, like, give entrepreneurship a go and I think we need more, more role models. We're going to write back to those goals.

There's lots of vultures floating around the scene and we also shouldn't create this environment where people are just what do Ray Nolan call them Grantrepreneurs Grantrepreneurs I thought that was hilarious. There's a lot of grantrepreneurs around. That's not good either. The other two things we need to do is leverage diaspora. So we've all these like super successful irish people all over the world and we don't leverage them right.

And then we're starting to see some initiatives when it's ireland doing more to leverage diaspora. But there's so much more we can do. Israel is famous for leveraging their diaspora. They are all supporting the mother nation. We've all this goodwill out there in the world super successful Irish people and we're not leveraging it. And I would say as well, saas companies could be like in the same town. I'm sure there's SaaS companies here in Cork that I don't know.

We're not helping each other scale and grow. We're not creating this environment where we're all in it together. It should be us versus the world. It doesn't matter if two of us in the same category, because the bigger opportunity is out there. I would love to see that change. There is a, if you're in software, by the way, there's a thing called SaaS Network Ireland. We're trying to get SaaS companies to help each other and to scale, and we've got some amazing speakers in.

We're trying to keep it. So it's not one of these kind of nonsense industry events where people just go and don't learn anything. We got in some unbelievable speakers. We had Des Trainor speak recently. You know he gave that nugget of wisdom that you should just assume AI is going to transform your industry and then prove it to be untrue. It's a kind of safe way to go forward. You know it's brilliant nuggets.

We had April Dunford, who's the world's most renowned person on positioning of companies, in for a talk as well, and the idea is that every SAS company will make themselves available to people who are not as far along on the journey as them.

And once you're scaling up and it's just a brilliant book to kind of ground you in reality and once you're scaling up there's a just a book called Crucial Conversations and at some point you're going to have, you know, a scenario where you've got to have tough conversations. You're probably going to be avoiding them. Maybe you've outgrown one of your employees in their role or whatever. Maybe your co-founder isn't working out, whatever it is.

This book is just brilliant on how you deal with that in a real honest way. It really helped me along the way. There's another book called "'The Hard Thing About Hard Things' by Ben Horowitz". It came out 10 years ago. It is the best, actually the best book ever. It is fucking hard. It's recommended a lot.

There's a book called Rocket Fuel and it outlines that the common traits of a visionary CEO is that, you know, it lists all their good traits and it kind of sounded like it was talking exactly about me, but then it lists all your bad traits and it sounded like it's talking exactly about me like you know can't pay attention to someone unless they make their point in 10 seconds and I was like guilty as charged, right, and it was all these common traits and it's just it's kind of reassuring to

know that it's common. But what it recommends you do is get somebody to be your kind of, your copilot, your CEO or they call it an integrator in the book, but it's someone who's going to filter out all your crazy ideas. You'll have like 20 crazy ideas and only one of them will actually be the one that's going to drive you forward. And that person kind of acts as a filter and that kind of acts as a stabilizer and helps coordinate your ideas. Often visionary CEOs don't have good follow through.

They're good at coming up with the ideas, they're good at kickstarting projects, but they're not good at keeping it going. They get bored and they move on to the next thing. And that integrator can kind of stabilize the ship and keep you focused and hold people accountable and stuff. It's a brilliant book. What's?

So a login mechanism, a logout mechanism, account management, price plan management, the ability to upgrade, to downgrade, to add users, like all this kind of like boilerplate, and we're all kind of recreating the same thing over and over. And then there's that 10% that's unique to every app. Nobody's given us the. There should be, I think, interesting. We all used to manage our own servers back in the day, and then AWS came out and they said we'll just do that for you. And that pain went away.

And we're like, oh yeah, we'll just do that's way easier. I think you should have the same thing for all that crud, and then you build your product on top of it. Nobody's made it yet, and Ray Nolan had the same idea. So either myself or Ray are going to work together on it or we'll be competing.

I'd rather you work in McDonald's as a side job and do your startup on the side than go raise money straight away. I believe there's only a couple of scenarios in which you should raise money.

So one is you've already reached a tipping point where now you want to scale something up right, so you've got some traction, you've got some revenue, you're in a good place and I'm talking like five million mark at least, right and you believe that you need to scale up by getting you know sales teams in North America, whatever. That's a good moment to scale, but not to get from the get-go.

Another one is if you got expensive hardware requirements so maybe you're doing DNA testing or something you just have expensive hardware requirements that's a good reason, fair enough, go get investment, but that's rare. And the third one is like, if you're a moonshot or nothing, which most things, things aren't. If it's like Airbnb, right, it's either going to go work or it's going to crash, and I'm not going to spend the next 10 years of my life figuring out which one it is.

That's rare that you're in that category, but that's a good option as well. And I'd say the other thing is I mean, if you're over 30 or you have a mortgage or kids, then, yeah, fair enough, go raise money, even though you'll be better off if you didn't. What's something in your personal life you spend money on that brings you immense happiness. If I'm honest, I'm not really that materialistic or into brands or anything. I do love my Tesla.

I really, really love it Trying to get a new right-hand drive model S. Apart from that, the second I got money. I bought a place in Portugal and I take the family over to Portugal a few times a year and we absolutely love it and get away from the miserable winter on again.

You can make yourself look bigger. That's another thing I often see um like you should make your website good. Just copy someone else's website. But, like you know, it's a low bar. You know it can really transform people's perception of your company or product to just have a good website. I see loads of websites where people love putting up an about us section about we are the founders and there's two of us and my dog and it actually just makes you look.

Have a look at your website objectively and think about what makes us look small or flip it inverted and be like how can we make this look like we're a 50 person company? I see that mistake all the time and the other thing is just tenacity, just go for it. If you don't raise money as well, you can pivot, pivot, pivot, pivot, and there's a million different ways to make money. The other thing is, like a lot of people are seeking their like a $50 million idea.

Right, there's a thing called the stair-step technique in software. There's a website called software, there's a podcast called software for the rest of us, and it outlines this really good technique. It's just like build your first product. Your first product is going to be a one-page website that sells like a course or downloads a pdf or something simple.

But you know, you learn how to make a product, how to sell things, how to have a checkout out of a simple brand, and then, once you get that working, you build your second product and might be a little bit more involved. Then you build your third product and you, by fourth product, you're building something that's going to make you a couple of million. But it recommends you go through these steps rather than go from nought to 50 miles an hour Beautiful.