Episode 627 | TinySeed Tales s3e5: Meeting the Co-Founder

Rob Walling:
Welcome back to TinySeed Tales. This is the penultimate episode of season three where we meet Tony’s co-founder. I hope you’ve been enjoying this season so far. If you like it, it’d be awesome if you could reach out to me on Twitter at Rob Walling at Start-Ups Pod and let me know if you’d like a fourth season. At this point, I have not started recording one, and I am looking to hear if there’s interest in hearing more stories like this. And with that, let’s dive into this episode of TinySeed Tales.

Tony Chan:
We’re pretty intentional about our interview process. Come off disorganized, and you come off like you don’t know what you’re doing, and you’re just roping in random people here and there, and you’re not setting up the right expectations, it can look really bad. Especially our very, very good candidate can sniff that out.

Rob Walling:
Welcome back to TinySeed Tales, a series where I follow a founder through their struggles, victories, and failures as they build their startup. I’m your host, Rob Walling. I’m a serial entrepreneur and co-founder of TinySeed, the first startup accelerator designed for bootstrappers. So far this season, I’ve been talking to Tony Chan of Cloud Forecast. Today we’ll be joined by a new voice. So Tony, this week you brought a friend with you. Would you like to introduce the third person here on the pod?

Tony Chan:
Yeah. I had to drag and convince Francois, my technical co-founder, to join us. So he is on the line, and I think it’ll be great to get his perspective on how things are going since you’ve heard from me the last four episodes.

Rob Walling:
And we keep hearing you mention this co-founder by name. Finally.

Tony Chan:
So he exists. He’s not fake.

Rob Walling:
He actually exists.

Tony Chan:
Yeah. He’s my French counterpart and my co-founder the last three years, and I’ve known Francois since 2011, so we’ve been working together for quite some time.

Rob Walling:
Francois, how’s it going?

Francois Lagier:
Hi, everybody. Yeah, it’s been 10 years since Tony and I know each other which is crazy.

Rob Walling:
How did you meet?

Francois Lagier:
We both work at the same startup. He was the Director of Customer Success, and he was kind of doing everything, and I was one of the lead engineer over there.

Rob Walling:
The company where Tony and Francois first met was called Perfect Audience. We talked a bit more about it back in the first episode of this season, but let’s get back to the present.
I want to kick today off by revisiting a couple things from the last episode, episode four. When Tony and I last spoke, he mentioned that in a month, in essence, you had doubled your MRR up to 35,000, which is just a huge shock to the system where suddenly you have this influx of capital. Tony had mentioned that with the money you were thinking about hiring a senior engineer, didn’t have concrete plans yet. What’s happened with that?

Francois Lagier:
We found one. First, we look at the type of person we wanted to hire. The seniority, the experience, and we really wanted to bring someone on board that would really help us bring the app to another level. Someone with a lot of experience, someone that can help us grow the skill sets that we have in the team, that can help us grow the engineers that we have in the team, including myself. We went on LinkedIn. We did a long list of older people that we think would be a right fit, and we found one, actually the first one. It was way too easy, and I think Tony and I should not get used to that because it should not be that easy to find someone.It took us two weeks.
Tony Chan:
We got so lucky with that one. I was joking with Francois that we should probably play the lot right after that because hiring someone of this person’s caliber in such a short time is unheard of.
Rob Walling:
And how did that come about? The specifics?
Francois Lagier:
Tony and I defined the type of person we wanted. I went on LinkedIn using sales navigator, which is usually a sales product, and I start searching leads, senior engineers based on connections that I believe I could get an intro. That person was actually a former co-worker of TinySeed, so I asked her to make an intro asking if he was looking for a job. He said yes. Week after we had a first interview. Next week we did four interviews, and three days after that, he had an offer, and he’s starting March 1st.
Tony Chan:
And all this happened while I was in Hawaii, so Francois was slacking me, and he was super stressed about it because he was a good person overall, culturally good fit and everything, and he was just stressing like, “Okay, how can we make this work? How can we make this work?” While I’m on the beach, trying to text him, “We’ll make it work. Just chill out a bit. We’ll make it happen.” And when literally the Friday, that week I got back, he set up three interviews and got it all ready. So I flew back from Hawaii, had an interview, and then we made an offer, and then in few days he just accepted it, so it happened really fast.
Rob Walling:
And Francois, what were you worried about when you were saying, “How are we going to make this work?” What were you worried wasn’t going to work?
Francois Lagier:
The person told me that he was looking for new opportunities, and during my first interview, I could clearly see that there’s a perfect culture of it with the type of company we want to run and the type of company he wanted to join, and I was just concerned he’s going to find another company, especially with COVID and the remote market is crazy, and this person is looking [inaudible 00:05:06], so if he was start looking for a job, he’s going to find one very quickly, so I just wanted to move fast. But at the same time, do things the right way so line up the right interview with the right persons, figure out the interview tests for more senior candidates, so I wanted to do it either right way, but I also wanted to do it fast. So we don’t miss him.
Rob Walling:
I always feel that sense of urgency when I find someone amazing on the first interview, and I’m like, “This is the perfect fit.” I always ask myself two questions. Number one, how quickly can we move? And number two, what am I missing? Is there a blind spot? Do they have a secret red flag that I didn’t pick up in that interview?
Tony Chan:
And we’re pretty intentional about our interview process. And I think that comes from the experience of Francois being at Twitter. It’s not our first rodeo. So when we set up a process, we have it all nailed down from start to finish and roping into right people. So he chatted with Francois and then he started messaging me. Then he chatted with me and then we wanted to make sure Kattya was on board as well, so we built that into the process and then looped back with Francois in the technical interview. And then we had an advisor of ours, also a friend of ours, who was Francois’s former boss to also vet this person as well. So it’s always important to have a process, and the person on the other hand also understand what the expectation is, right? Because it really shows what type of company you are and what kind of process oriented company you are.
So instead of trying to duct tape everything together, right, just making sure that it looks professional, that’s still very important and making sure you hire the right person because if you come off disorganized and you come off like you don’t know what you’re doing, and you’re just roping in random people here and there, and you’re not setting up the right expectations, it can look really bad. Especially a very, very good candidate can sniff that out.
I’m still awed that someone of his caliber and someone of his experience would be willing to work for a company like ours. And not saying that we are terrible or what-not, but we’re a small bootstrap startup. There’s a lot of opportunities out there in the world that could use him in other companies as well, but the fact that he chose us, and he was very excited about us, that is super encouraging to hear and super encouraging for Francois and I being owners that we’re building things the right way and that we were able to sell him on the vision, right? Because that’s a risk that he’s willing to take as well on us, and he’s betting on us as well.
Rob Walling:
I agree. And it’s a very competitive landscape right now, and good developers can kind of pick where they want to go. What do you think made the difference for him?
Tony Chan:
I think the main difference was just meeting Francois and I in person, seeing how we work together, and the culture that we’re trying to build. Francois and I always talk about this and just being good people and being fair, having empathy and building a good culture has been always the important thing for us while building a business. The business can go sideways and fail and what-not, but knowing that we tried to build things the right way and knowing that we try to be good people while doing it, we can sleep at night. And I think, well, I hope it came out while we were interviewing with him.
Rob Walling:
I’m always impressed with Tony’s grasp of healthy company culture. He knows that a job interview goes both ways, and the chaotic impression that an unprepared interviewer can give. Tony talks a lot about intentionality, and I think it’s an important core value to a company that seeks to grow and maintain happy employees. The new engineer is named Arturo and hiring him is a definite victory for Tony and Francois. Hopefully it hasn’t been the only win in recent months.
If I were to guess, I think it’s been about six weeks since we talked, just for context. Are there any other big wins that you can think of since we last spoke?
Francois Lagier:
There was a couple. The first one is kind of a win where I think we reach another level in time of companies. Where the first year Tony and I had no idea what we were doing, we’re just trying things, and any of the things we were trying was working on notes. The second year we had clients, we can talk to them and try to build stuff that they like, that they wanted. The third year, we have bigger clients, and we can ask even more questions. The fourth year with the new enterprise deal, we have even more clients, and we have more money that we can play with and try new things. And I think that’s a win because now we can plan things the right way and do things the right way.
Where before, as a bootstrap startup, we don’t have millions in the bank. We would always try to act our way around it. Now we have a bit more cash, and we can do things the right way for sure. The second one, it’s our pipeline is getting better. We have new enterprise opportunities that Tony’s working on. November, December’s always slow for us, so it’s always nice to see the sign ups going back up.
Rob Walling:
Do you feel like the holidays, do you feel like it was a December lull with the pipeline?
Francois Lagier:
Yeah. Between Thanksgiving and Christmas, it’s always [inaudible 00:10:09] opportunities. People don’t reply to Tony because they are on vacation. The company will not start a new project around that time, so it’s pretty dead for us which is also a good time for us to launch new things and really focus on the engineering side and product development side, but at the end, revenue is our key metric, so we want that pipeline to be nice and healthy.
Rob Walling:
Yeah. That makes sense. It’s a typical business to business seasonality, right? December was always awful for all of my B2B apps and then either April or May usually had a lull, and I ascribed it to tax month here in the U.S. We sold majority to U.S. customers, and December would sometimes just completely be completely flat, a zero growth. We’d be growing 5 or 10 grand a month, and then it would go to zero in December. And I was like, “This is incredible. It’s like hitting the breaks.” And then April slash May, it would just slow down. It would get cut in half or get cut by 75%, but there was still some growth. And I know all businesses, all B2B apps are not like that, but that was just my experience.
Francois Lagier:
I think that’s also why TinySeeds is very useful to us, where we talked to other founders, and they see the exact same thing. That help us realize that we are not the problem, it’s just, it’s a B2B thing.
Rob Walling:
Yeah, that’s a good point. Because there was a lot of conversation in the Slack, many threads about is everyone else seeing this and everyone else feeling this way about it? Is it slow for you as well? Some people started slowing down in November and then some folks held on until December and then the majority kicked back in because I see the updates right, I get the updates on the first of the month from all the companies, and overwhelmingly, the February 1st update for January was, in general, they were all positive of things are really kicked back in gear. There’s still a handful that are not, and to your point, to those, you’re not matching the pattern, so it may be your individual space or may be your app itself, your business, is slowing down due to other factors.
Francois Lagier:
The perfect example of TinySeed founders community was during COVID where I think during June and July, it was kind of dead for us, and that’s because that was the first time in couple of years that everybody could go on vacation, right? So it had nothing to do with our business, it’s just like that was the first time people could actually travel a little bit and take some time off. And every founders we talked to kind of noticed the same thing.
Rob Walling:
I always find it interesting that you can literally have more money than you know what to do with and your business can still grind to a halt during holidays and vacations. In some ways, time is a much more nuanced obstacle to overcome than money. Tony and Francois are finding that out firsthand right now.
Francois Lagier:
I think there’s a lot of initiative that we want to take with Tony when it comes to marketing, when it comes to product development, when we talk to sales and anything, and it’s kind of overwhelming. Where do we spend our time planning? Where it’s only two founders, and it’s hard to decide what should be a focus in term of product or in term of content marketing, and we’ve talked to a lot of mentors from TinySeed trying to figure out what’s the best way forward, but it’s a challenging decision to make. I think Tony’s going to focus a lot on the content marketing is this the right decision? We have no idea. And I think that’s kind of, I think Rob, you mentioned that a lot, our job is to make the best decision with incomplete data. That’s exactly where we are right now. Where what’s next, we’re just not sure, but that’s just part of being a founder.
Tony Chan:
And a lot of that is also trying to reframe my mindset on it’s not only the ROI but how can I remove myself some of the processes and hire people. So Francois has a pretty good cadence with Kattya and soon with Arturo who will be joining, but how can we start thinking about our business more strategically and putting our heads towards that area versus me being the glue and duct taping everything together and doing things the right way versus before it was just slap together. For example, our websites on WordPress, our documentations on Jekyll and then our blog is on another instance at Jekyll. So it’s like, how do we move from that so we can do things the right way and look professional? But also how can we hire the right people so we can think about the bigger picture and things? And it’s almost a big transition period of our business of where we’re at, at the moment.
Rob Walling:
Yeah. I’ve often talked about these stages of building a startup in general. And I said, at first you build a product, then you build a business, and then you build a company. And usually the product is you’re just scraping along to build something that anyone wants and then you start getting some revenue and now you can kind of spend that. And that’s when I say you’re kind of starting to build a business. And if when you have 10K, 20K, 30K a month, and you’re starting to try to figure out where to invest it, that can get complicated.
And I think this is something that every founder, almost every founder, I guess if you’re like a narcissistic sociopath, you know exactly that you’re right, and you’re doing all the amazing stuff, but everyone I know who starts a company is always wondering, “What should I do next from these infinite possibilities? I can literally do anything.” And that’s a challenge. It’s the paradox of choice really? Right? That you don’t know what will get you to your goal the fastest, so you just have to take your best educated guess, gather data, take a guess, experiment, and see what works.
Francois Lagier:
Do you think bootstrap founders run into this issue even more because they don’t have millions in the bank to try 10 things at the same time?
Rob Walling:
I do think that because we have to do it in series, not in parallel. I have a friend, I’m invested in his company, and I think he just raised $5 million, $6 million. He’s hiring up a big staff, and they can literally do seven different things at once. They’re doing content and SEO and ads and they’re building the product and they’re doing PR and you can’t do that. You have to pick one, maybe two.
Tony Chan:
Yeah. I feel like the margin for error on our side is a lot slimmer, right? I wouldn’t say you have to hit home runs, but you really have to be on point with the decisions you make because the money and time invested, the funds are limited, right, even though we have unlimited possibilities.
Rob Walling:
Tony, where is the content SEO effort? Where does that stand? Have you started working on it?
Tony Chan:
Yeah. So there are some initiatives that we’re investing in. We are working with the company to help us with quality back link building on a broad level to help us bring up our domain rating a little bit so we can rank for things a little bit higher. I mean, we already work with an agency that have technical writers to help us write in depth or just top of the funnel content for us, which has been great. But we talked to ScrapingBee, we talked to a few other TinySeed founders. The common theme that we’re hearing is just doing things a little bit more internally because you have a little bit more in control what’s being outputted as well.
So there’s a level of process that Francois and I have been just trying to figure out. It’s almost like a business in a business that we’re building, and that’s the one advice that ScrapingBee put out there. So things are moving, we’re producing content, right, but it’s like, how can we be a bit more intentional about our investment and what type of things that we’re writing and just planning out further 6 to 12 months in advance versus before it was just a month to month sprint of what we’re going to write and such. So just being a little bit more strategic about how we’re producing things overall.
Rob Walling:
I do find it funny that when Tony and I talked last time, I take notes of what he says, and I have probably a paraphrase quote that says, “Kind of overwhelmed deciding how to spend this money well.” And then for the not loss challenge that Francois said is, “Overwhelming deciding where to invest our time.” And I think that’s going to be a theme for a bit, and I wouldn’t expect that to go away too soon. It does get easier over time as you have more resources and as you get further along and you rule things out over time and discover new opportunities. But with that said Francois, I’m curious, let’s say Tony and I talk again in a month, what thing are you most looking forward to?
Francois Lagier:
Arturo is going to start on March 1st, and the same way we did with Kattya, we’re going to have a month long onboarding with small projects around the apps we can learn or stack, but after that, we’re going to start being able to plan what’s next. He has the experience to be able to lead a big project without me being involved on the day-to-day, and I can’t wait to see what that project’s going to be. And we have a few of them in mind, but when he can start working with that, bringing Kattya on board on the front end side and everything that can really bring her up to the next level and potentially implement features that our clients have been asking forever, but we never got a chance to do it or the time to do it or the money to do it as well, which will bring overall a better experience for our clients, new features, and a better way for clients to monitor our DWS cost, which is at the end, our mission and our goal.
Tony Chan:
Gives me time to play more Pokemon and Zelda, I guess.
Rob Walling:
Boom. Look at that.
Tony Chan:
I’m on the same page as Francois. We’ve always been very product led with marketing kind of tailing right behind it a bit, and we’ve built our company to really focus on customer feedback and what our users are saying and what they want and what Francois and I ultimately want is that we just want to make people’s lives easier and bring value to them. That gives us the most fulfillment. So the fact that we have an engineering department and product department and someone can lead and Francois can not worry so much about ROI and all the nitty gritty stuff, I think our products and what we’re building and the niche that we are focused on, we are only going to improve from there, right, especially with the resources we have there.
I’m also looking forward to what we’re doing on the content side, right? We’re starting to invest money. It’s still early on, and we have some technical things on that side that we’re trying to solve, but I think in a month or two, I’m hoping that we learn a bit more and what we’ve always been able to do is just figure things out, learn, ask the right advice, get the right people in place to run those processes, and hopefully continue to grow our business, so I think in two months we’d be in pretty good shape, and I think in two months, that’s close to our end of TinySeed as well, so I’m looking forward to it, not like, hey, it’s over, but it’s going to be bittersweet because we really enjoyed our time meeting other founders through the retreats and such. We’ll still be part of the community, but it’s going to be a whole year, and that’s kind of crazy to us.
Rob Walling:
Yeah, it sure is. It goes fast. It goes fast for me, too I’ll admit. All the founders say, “Man, it goes so fast.” But it really does. I think for all of us because when your head’s down building the business, you’re not really looking at the calendar. And I feel like if I were to say, “Where will you be in a year?” We think, “We can get so much done. Do you realize how much further along our product will be and how many marketing reports will have and how much bigger we’ll be?” And then oftentimes it takes a little longer than you’d think it might, and I think that makes time feel shorter. How about you, Francois? Anything you’re dreading over the next month or two?
Francois Lagier:
Not dreading. I think the one thing we are going to be careful is making sure the onboarding goes really well, the same way we do with Kattya. I don’t have any concerns around it, it’s more something that we need to be on top of. I think it’s interesting because my mindset kind of changed since the baby’s around the house now where I don’t worry as much about the business because there’s no metrics or discussions with client that make me feel I should worry about the business. It’s moving. It’s moving at the right pace. We are having the right discussions with Tony, and we’re making the right moves which doesn’t mean it’s going to work out, but we’re doing what we can, which is definitely not the question you asked, but that’s what it led to.
Tony Chan:
Yeah, I wouldn’t say I’m dreading it, but the areas that as Francois mentioned that we’re going to put a lot of attention and I feel like a lot of brain power, right, which would lead to a little bit of dread. I think Francois and I enjoy a lot of it even if we dread it, right, is just making sure we’re on point with onboarding Arturo and making sure that we build the culture that he feels included and also for future employees as well, right? Being very on point with that and being very intentional about every step of the process so he feels like he’s part of the team, he’s contributing and doing what’s needed to move. That is the core part. And there’s a lot of brain power to make sure that happens, right? There’s a lot of effort to do that. And there’s a lot of upfront investment mentally to do that.
However, I think long term that will pay its dividends. The other thing too is making decisions, it’s tough, right? There’s always one or two ways or three or four ways that you can do things, right? Whether it’s on a nitty gritty level, it’s like, “Oh, should we move everything to WordPress? Okay. Move to WordPress. How do we do it? Who should we talk to? Who should we hire? How much should we should invest?” But at the same time, it’s like, “Okay, we have the money. Let’s just put money in there and figure it out and find someone to help us figure that out and ask the right questions.” Right? And who do we get involved in that? So it’s like, it’s tough making decisions as you mentioned, but it’s stuff that needs to be done. And once again, looking at the big picture and making sure that we’re grateful that we could even spend money and even invest in it and be able to do that.
Rob Walling:
It’s always refreshing to hear a positive attitude on this journey, and I have to give props to Tony and Francois for keeping their heads on straight. In the coming episodes, we’ll be keeping an eye on the state of Cloud Forecast’s content strategy, and we’ll check in with how new hire Arturo integrates with the team. That’s next time on TinySeed Tales.