[00:00:27] Jay: Hi, everyone. Welcome to The First Customer podcast. My name's Jay Aigner today. I am lucky enough to be joined by Matt Watson. It's a,it's a week where. We could not be friends if we didn't want to be because the Eagles are playing the Chiefs.
[00:00:42] Matt: Go Chiefs.
[00:00:43] Jay: Go birds. this is my, this is like a first.
I've never had anybody whose team I'm playing this week, especially a Super Bowl rematch. those who don't care about football will not care at all about this. But, anyway, Matt, thanks for joining me, buddy. How are you? Oh,
[00:00:58] Matt: champion has arrived.
[00:01:00] Jay: he's had, it's fair. You know, the Taylor Swift, the Taylor Swiftie has arrived. all right. So where did you grow up and, did that have any impact on you being an entrepreneur?
[00:01:11] Matt: So I was born in Oklahoma, but I've lived in Kansas city since I was about five years old. And I would say my entrepreneurial journey probably started with my parents. So my dad actually worked at a flea market here in Kansas city. Every single weekend, I was like at an old drive in movie theater.
We'd go out there every single Saturday and Sunday morning. I'd actually sleep there on Friday nights in his van. And then Saturday morning, get up at like four o'clock and go in and claim our spot and set up our stuff. But, I worked with him every weekend and he would just go buy random stuff at garage sales and sell it.
And he sold kids, toys and socks and used books and expired medicine and like all this kind of junk. And my mom did the exact same thing in Oklahoma too. And so maybe that kind of got my entrepreneurial spirit going as a kid.
[00:01:57] Jay: I would have to assume it did. I mean, you got to see the acquisition and the sale and probably the, all
the other stuff in between,
[00:02:05] Matt: I did all the work. I'm out there like taking money from customers and count and
[00:02:09] Jay: right. Well,
[00:02:10] Matt: it all up. Like,
you learn the importance of delegation very early, right? it all got delegated to me.
[00:02:15] Jay: you were the one who got delegated to. So I'm sure you couldn't wait to do that later. so Oklahoma, I think of as a very sparsely populated state. it was kind of, let's say, I'm going to say this is like a politically correct way, country like backwoods, like how would you describe where you grew up?
[00:02:33] Matt: you know, one thing I noticed now from being in Kansas city, we have a lot of big trees, the fall and everything. it's very beautiful. There's something about when you cross the state line. From Kansas to Oklahoma, all of a sudden, like all the trees disappear and, they have a lot more shrubs and smaller trees.
It's just different. I don't know how to describe it. And the biggest, the weirdest thing about Oklahoma is most of the soil is red. And so you're like driving down the highway and you see, you know, dirt on the side of the road and it's red, which is totally weird. it's probably the most unique thing about Oklahoma.
[00:03:03] Jay: The most unique thing. I mean, I believe that the color of the dirt in Oklahoma, I'm just kidding. If there's anybody in Oklahoma, don't take that personally. all right. So, you've started a ton of companies, you know, I was on your podcast, which is awesome. Where did you go from kind of, you know, flea market on the weekends, to first business?
Like what was the real first business that you started?
[00:03:24] Matt: Yeah. So the first company I started was called then solutions. For that, it was actually called Vin Stickers and it was originally called Dealer Tech. but my story goes like this. I was about 19. I was selling computers at Sears. You know, that place doesn't exist anymore. That's old, like Kenmore appliances, like that place.
that's where I worked. I sold computers. And so car dealer came in, wanted to buy a computer. I asked him, what is he going to use it for? That's how I figured out he was a car dealer. And, Long story short, he had some kind of software he needed help with. The guy who wrote the software was crazy and he was worried about all of it.
I didn't know what I was doing. I was in college. But I said, hey, maybe I can help you with that software. And, I ended up helping this car dealer for about two different years, two years, build a little database and everything. And, he ended up introducing me to my co founder. Of what became Venn Solutions a couple of years later.
So if I would have not have met John at Sears, John ended up being the guy who was the conduit of this thing later. So,
[00:04:22] Jay: and were you a developer? Did you want to be a developer? Is that what you got your degree in? Like, how did that connect?
[00:04:28] Matt: Yeah, at that time I was going to, DeVry University here in Kansas City to do computer programming related stuff. Yeah, and so I, through, through this whole time period, though, I worked a couple other jobs. I ended up working a couple other jobs as a software developer before I ended up starting what became Ben solutions in 2003 when I was like 22.
So,
[00:04:48] Jay: so you had, I mean, that's, you already hit the, we could end there. I mean, you've told me your first customer, so I guess the show is over, but you
have multiple shows. You have multiple companies with multiple first customers. So what's next? You did
this kind of one off, go ahead.
[00:05:00] Matt: so let's talk about this one a little bit more because so the way it started is my co founder was working for auto trader and at this time, auto trade. com was totally new. This was 2003. Like people don't have digital cameras. People don't upload videos. Pictures of cars, the internet, like it's totally different time.
Right. but he had 20 customers that were auto trader customers, like auto trader. They like these car dealers wanted to put their photos online. And it was a simple idea of how do we help take pictures of cars and do some basic marketing of them? that's how it started. And he had the first 20 customers.
And probably the most important thing of all of it is there was a car dealership named Gary Crosley, Ford. Which I'll never forget was customer number 11 actually was our demo customer and referral for eight years. And it was like the most important customer we ever had was one of our first customers.
And, that was kind of the beginnings of it.
[00:05:55] Jay: mean, it's, this is a softball question, but did that, and has that been a lesson for you in the quality and service that you provide to people knowing that they're going to be your biggest salespeople going forward? Right?
[00:06:12] Matt: Absolutely. And I, you never know when you meet somebody, if they will, we were talking about this last night at dinner, like, you know, worst case scenario, you meet with somebody and they don't buy, but hopefully they refer somebody else to you that is a better fit later. Right? Like hopefully they become a referral.
I think that's the way you have to always be thinking about as a business owner. It's like every single person you talk to, maybe they're not a customer, but they might know somebody who is. And so you want to have a good impression on them, even if they're not going to buy. Yeah.
[00:06:37] Jay: Yeah. that reminds me of this guy that told me a quote and he said,you know, I'll be, I would be upset, with myself, you know, if, people hadn't heard of me now, because they didn't want to work with me. Right. So like, if somebody at least hears of you, then like you've done your job.
And so let's talk about, Events, it was Venn Systems, right? Venn Solutions, how long were you there? How big did it get? Like, what was the kind of growth of that company?
[00:07:04] Matt: started in 2003. We sold it in 2011 to auto trader, ironically, which is Cox,automotive, they own a bunch of things now, but, so it was about an eight year journey and we actually bootstrapped it to do about 35 million a year in revenue when we
[00:07:18] Jay: wow.so what'd you do after that?
[00:07:21] Matt: So. I was stupid. I, you know, I had been a CTO basically my whole career and decided to start my own company, which was a company called Stackify, trying to solve my own problems. I think I thought I knew what I was doing. I thought I was going to be the first customer. And, I think made a lot of mistakes other entrepreneurs make where.
You're too close to the problem. You think, you know what you need? You think, you know what the market wants, blah, blah, blah. I think I kind of fell into that trap. And, eventually we made it all work over several years and the company grew and we were earning 500 and all that kind of stuff, but it was tough.
It was really hard. But, and then we eventually sold that company as well to a company called Netro. But, You know, our first customer, was ourselves, of course, building it for internal use, but it was actually our, landlord that we were in our office from, he wanted to be the first customer.
So he, I'll never forget. He like gave us a check and he's like, you have to frame this or your first customer. So,
[00:08:13] Jay: well you've mentioned that you've sold two companies now. what is that process like and does it get easier as you go? I know, I think we could, I
[00:08:26] Matt: you know, we could do a whole podcast episode just on that question. But, the first time around, it was a lot of fun. I mean, we were doing great. we were like, you know, things couldn't have been going better for us. Things were, the company was rapidly growing. We had the product. We, you know, we were kind of the Cinderella at the time and it was a fun process.
And, we had this, me and one of the partners had this joke. We'd call each other up and be like, Every day, like that's how we would answer the call because it was like every day we got a better offer, you know, it was like a few more million dollars or whatever to buy the company. It was like this crazy thing.
so it was a fun journey. the second time around with stackify, you know, I don't know about you, you probably get these too, like randomly every week you get these stupid random spam emails about I'm looking to buy a business. Do you want to sell your business? I want to buy one business or whatever, like all this kind of junk.
Yeah. And, you know, a lot of them I ignore, but sometimes I reply back to him, like, Hey, if it's a serious, like strategic, you know, acquire, I'm interested. Otherwise don't waste my time. I don't want to run some kind of process. And, they just happen to be like, yeah, it's serious. I know the random email I replied to.
And so, but it took like six to nine months to complete that sale. The weirdest thing was it was during COVID. So we sold the company. We started the transaction in 2020. And then didn't finish it until April of 2021. And the wildest part of all of it, we never met the acquirer, the private equity, any of them in person.
Because it was like during COVID, like they were scared for us to come to California. I'm like, I'm not scared. I will come to California and meet you.
no. We can't do that. Okay.
[00:10:04] Jay: So you sold the whole business virtually.
[00:10:07] Matt: Yeah. Never met them. Isn't that bizarre?
[00:10:11] Jay: that is wild.so where did full scale come from? Where did that start?
[00:10:17] Matt: You know, it was an accidental business during the, during the middle of stackify. I needed to hire 10 software developers to add support for different programming languages and different things we were doing. And there was just no way I was going to afford it. And my friend had some employees in the Philippines and had fantastic luck.
Yeah. You know, just like you and your business. And he just convinced me, he's like, Hey, Matt, try it. Let's try hiring a few people in the Philippines. We'll just get like a little office, little coworking space, you know, maybe 20 people work there, my, my employees and his employees. And I said, all right, fine, let's do it.
And it's like, you know, we can set up as a little partnership. If we know some other people that could take advantage of this, you know, maybe we'll turn it into a little business. And then we hired like a hundred people in the next nine months. And it was like a crazy. Crazy ordeal that it was an actual business.
And then fast forward today, we have 300 employees.
[00:11:08] Jay: I want to touch on something.how much did you consider, your owning multiple businesses?kind of the. The impression that would give for your businesses that came first, right? Like how did you take that? Did you think people were going to see it and think, man, this guy isn't really focused on, you know, stackify or anything first.
what was your thought process for kicking off
another business and making that public and like letting your team know that you're doing that. And like, you know, they're, I'm just curious what they, what that process was.
[00:11:41] Matt: so my business partner ran full scale. So I was not really involved in the day to day of it. and so I didn't have any qualms with it. And those that asked is like, I was doing it in service of stack fire, like stack fire, you know, was the biggest customer of that business, but you actually would probably find interesting who the first customer was.
The full scale is actually more interesting story.
[00:12:01] Jay: Sure.
[00:12:02] Matt: It was a shoe store. So. My business partner, the way that he got into this. And part of the reason we had this aha moment of where we should do this is he had done some consulting for one of the largest resellers of shoes, you know, like weird Jordan shoes and then, you know, all this kind of stuff, the Yeezys come out, all this kind of stuff, right?
Those that are sneaker heads, a company called urban necessities in Las Vegas, and. They, as you can imagine, they had stacks of boxes of shoes everywhere. They didn't know what they had, what was for sale. Like it was a total chaos. They just had hundreds of thousands of boxes of shoes everywhere. So he helped them like figure out an inventory system for that.
And like, a reselling, consignment website and all this kind of stuff. He helped them figure out the software to build all this, but my business partner wasn't software developer. You know, we had software developers, a couple of software developers in the Philippines that were helping them do it, but he built this whole system.
And that was part of the genesis of this was like, man, we're still doing this for urban necessities. Maybe we can just do this for other people. Like, you know, the margins were good, you know, for what we paid our employee and all this, I'm like, we should make this into a business. And so that was actually kind of the genesis of it.
And if any of you listening have been to Las Vegas recently, and you went to Caesars and to the forum shops, Urban Necessities has a huge store there
[00:13:19] Jay: Oh,
[00:13:20] Matt: and they still use our software today.
So I was just there a couple weeks ago. So it was really cool to see Urban Necessities right there in the forum shops and teasers.
[00:13:29] Jay: Did you go to the,
[00:13:30] Matt: where it started.
[00:13:30] Jay: did you go to the sphere when you were in Las Vegas?
[00:13:33] Matt: I didn't go in it, but I saw it and drove around it. It was so cool. They have like two or three shows a day. Now you can go in and watch a little show they do.
[00:13:41] Jay: I did see that like it's pretty, accessible now. I thought for sure it would be like booked out till whenever, but, so we talked about the pot, we touched on the podcast. what is it? What's, you know, who are you, who did you make it for? And what's the real reason you made it, right? I mean, there was, I love when people just tell me they've made a podcast to help people, which some of those they definitely are.
and I think there, it should serve someone. but what's your reasoning for the podcast and what have you gotten out of it so far?
[00:14:11] Matt: Yeah. So we started a podcast called Startup Hustle six years ago. We've done. 1200 and something episodes. It started out as something just kind of fun to do. Matt, my business partner, me, both named Matt, started this, I think is sort of like therapy of ourselves. And we wanted to just kind of have fun with it and be real talk about what it's like to own a business and the challenges of owning a business.
And then we. Only interviewed other people from Kansas city. So we had all sorts of other entrepreneurs that came in, some that had done some really cool stuff. We even had like the mayor of Kansas city and all these different people. And it was all very Kansas city kind of focused for the first, say, couple of years of it.
And then COVID happened and we all went remote and we're like, Oh man, we don't re we don't record podcasts. You know, only in Kansas city anymore. We've got to do it remote. And so now we were, you know, interview people from all over the place, even all over the world. and, but it's still very focused on entrepreneurs and other startups and trying to tell their stories and what they do and hoping that our listeners can learn from them and, Some way or another, you know, that those are the stories I'm trying to tell.
[00:15:19] Jay: That focus on Kansas City. did that help you,
with your connections in the business in that area?
[00:15:27] Matt: Yeah. So we, so Matt and I actually started the podcast before we started full scale. So we had started the podcast. We were just kind of having fun with it. And then when we started full scale, we're like, aha, how do we use this for marketing? And so that's where we, you know, tweaked a little bit of what we were doing to have a lot of the guests were potential customers and stuff like that.
And it worked really well from a. You know, sales perspective for full scale early on. And it still does like a lot of our guests are potential customers. So,
[00:15:55] Jay: Yeah. I mean, what is that? What is the strategy now? Like, I mean, you touched on it, but like, what's the, how do you go about it? I know you have teams doing a bunch of stuff. I think, you know, a lot of successful. Business owners are, but how are you, how did you kind of put that vision out there for them and say, like, here's who we need to go after and here's how we need to kind of run this differently than we've been doing.
[00:16:18] Matt: well, so one of the things we do is we'll do like the top startups of Kansas city or whatever. So right now we're talking about this yesterday. We're planning the top startups of Tampa. Florida, right? And so we'll make a giant list of all the different tech companies and startups, and we'll narrow it down.
We'll reach out to all of them and say, Hey, we're looking, considering, you know, companies for the top startup. Do you know anybody else who should be on the list? Like, give us a reason to reach out and talk to all these people. Right. and then we narrow it down to a list and then we. All of them to potentially be on the podcast.
we try and make a big deal out of it. A lot of them love it. They want their five minutes of fame of doing the podcast, you know, and it's free exposure to them. And we hear some great success stories from them too. They're like, Oh, I was on a podcast and I got like all these new customers and whatever.
so it. You know, it's great for them. It really is. And it's great exposure for them. We have, you know, podcast, our podcast has had millions of downloads. So, I mean, there's lots of people that get good exposure from it, but all in all, I mean, we're trying to target people we think could be potential customers.
I'll be honest. then it works really good for us. It's a great way to open the door and have a conversation with somebody. Instead of just sending like a cold spam message on LinkedIn and be like, Hey, I think your company is really interesting. You know, love to have you on the podcast. Like comes across way better than like, here's my Calendly link.
I should sell you something. Meet with me.
[00:17:35] Jay: It's so much better. And even in, especially in person, right? Like it
is the ultimate icebreaker in person. Like I was at two conferences last week and it is the easiest way there. I don't know if there's an easier way. Like, I don't know what the easier way would be. Like, do you want to be in my television show?
Like, other than that, like, what is it that, how do you not come across sounding salesy? Like you said, I mean, cause people will just be like, give you the stiff arm. you know, like DeAndre Swift is going to do to you guys this weekend. And, you know, but it is a great, it's an opener. It's an opener.
It's a free opener. It's like the
ultimate icebreaker.
[00:18:10] Matt: Yeah. And I've seen before, I don't know if you've seen this and some big, trade shows and events and things like that. They'll even record podcasts on site and we have not done that, but that's something I would like to do in 2024, like go to AWS is big event or Microsoft build or some like pet crunch event or whatever, and have the little startup, like a podcast, you know, booth set up and like record and do some stuff.
And that would be fun to do too.
[00:18:35] Jay: I love that. And then actually my friend who's the podcast called, founding Philly and at the packed capital conference last week, that's what he did. He had like, you know, the people who didn't get picked for the lion's den thing, which is like their knockoff of shark tank, they gave him the opportunity to be on his show and he got a bunch of people that are on and, It went really well.
So yeah, I think it's a great idea. I love that. And I love the top, startups in there. I think it's a great, anybody could do that. Right. I mean, it's a great, it's a great, that's a great idea. I love that.
[00:19:06] Matt: and you, once you start doing this for a while, I don't know how many of these you get every single day. We get messages from podcasts, like booking services.
[00:19:13] Jay: Oh yeah.
[00:19:14] Matt: They're like, Hey, you should have Jay on your podcast. And here's why he would be a great guest. Like we get lots of those every week and we have to turn away like 90 percent of them.
But you know, some of them are good. They're the guy that was on our podcast yesterday was one of them. Yeah,
[00:19:28] Jay: No, I think so.
I love that I think that's a yes.
[00:19:32] Matt: Sometimes the really big name people, you mentioned Lion's Den or whatever, one of the ones we had was one of the Shark Tank guys. He was trying to promote some book or something like that, and so he was like on a promo circuit, so
we had him on the podcast.
[00:19:45] Jay: I
think this CEO of fireflies, dot AI, which is, you know, a relative, like he reached out or his team or whoever, and we had, it was great and, but it was like, surprisingly well known companies, you can book on a podcast, and pod matches just. A fantastic service to kind of connect people.
So, I always kind of try to plug that when I can. so what do you, who is your target customer for Fullscale?
[00:20:13] Matt: would say they're kind of startups or scale ups, you know, people that are earlier stage startups kind of past like MVP seed stage though. they're past that. They're just looking to grow and scale. that's where a lot of our customers are. We do have some more like more. Small mid market companies as well.
They're like more established. We have some of those too. we've had a couple of startups that we helped them four or five years ago, all the way until now, until they had an exit. So that was super cool to see, you know, that's what we do. We build long term teams for people are like, Hey, I need a dev team for the next forever.
I need developers forever. Right. And we help them find. more affordable talent and based in the Philippines. And, yeah, the team stick around forever and we work for them forever. So,
[00:20:58] Jay: I love that. and how. how do you compete with other offshore shops? Is the fact that you're an established American company gives you an edge with that. And I'm sure there's, you know, Eastern European, like you see that a lot where there's like the U S hub or office. And then there's like the big, you know, shop over in Eastern Ukraine or Eastern Europe.
how do you guys compete with them? How do you,what's your kind of your selling points for that?
[00:21:24] Matt: so software development services, dev agency, and I'm sure even for what you guys do at JDA QA is it's primarily a transaction that's done with trust. People don't respond to spam emails or, and be like, yeah, I'll hire you to do half a million dollars worth of work. Sure.
[00:21:43] Jay: Right.
[00:21:44] Matt: It does. It does. It doesn't happen that way.
Right. the transactions are almost always done via trust. It's like, you know, somebody, you got a referral, maybe they watch your podcast for six months and are like, Hey, if I ever needed a QA guy, I'm calling Jay, you know, cause I love Jay. I love his podcast. Right. So you got to build some kind of relationship or trust with people.
And I think that's really what makes the difference.
[00:22:06] Jay: I think you're right. All right. one more question. non business related. If, and I think if I feel like I need to have you on a few times, there's a lot of stuff we can talk about, but, if you could do anything on earth and you knew you wouldn't fail, what would it be?
[00:22:22] Matt: make healthcare affordable. Is that an option?
[00:22:25] Jay: Yes. Well, I mean, you can't fail. You can do whatever the hell you want.
[00:22:28] Matt: Okay. We're going to do
[00:22:29] Jay: All right. It's done. It's in the books. You're marked down. I'll put you on my list as healthcare savior. I think, you know, we've had some around that, but that may be the first healthcare savior. Affordable answer. So, we'll mark you down, Matt.
You're fantastic. I love you on your podcast. I want to have you back on to talk more about just different stuff. You're great. if you want to find you or full scale, how do they do that?
[00:22:51] Matt: Yeah. Fullscale. io. you can check me out on LinkedIn too. Just look for Matt Watson. I post daily ramblings every day that you might find interesting. So
[00:23:00] Jay: you're an influencer.
You're influencing
[00:23:03] Matt: guess so. I have like 31, 000 followers on
[00:23:06] Jay: know I just, I saw that earlier today. I thought this guy's famous. Got famous
Matt on my podcast. All right. Well, Matt, you are fantastic. Thank you for being on go birds. And, I will be in touch Tuesday of next week. I have a feeling one way or the other
[00:23:23] Matt: Swifty.
[00:23:24] Jay: I mean, my wife, look, I'm telling, I think I told you this on the pot on your show, I went to the show when they were in Philly, cause my wife dragged me along.
It was, they put Eagles fans to shame. I mean, the stadium was literally moving, dude. It was
[00:23:35] Matt: I think there's one thing we can agree on. We are both Kelsey fans.
[00:23:38] Jay: That's a great look at that. What a great way to end it. Be good, brother. Thank you.
See you, man.