In episode 633, Rob Walling chats with Matt Wensing, the founder of Summit. Matt is no stranger on the podcast. And we talk about Matt’s decision to change Summit’s brand positioning and the far-reaching impact on his business.
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Topics we cover:
- 2:24 – Matt’s decision to change Summit’s positioning
- 15:22 – Redesigning Summit’s website
- 22:39 – The dangers of scaling up before you have product-market fit
- 24:43 – The response to Summit’s relaunch
- 29:33 – How Summit is evolving into a 2-sided marketplace
Links from the Show:
If you have questions about starting or scaling a software business that you’d like for us to cover, please submit your question for an upcoming episode. We’d love to hear from you.
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Welcome back to Startup For the Rest of Us. I’m your host, Rob Walling, and in this episode I talk with Matt Wensing, the founder of Summit. And we talk about how he’s been grinding away building his SAS and he’s adding a two-sided marketplace. A really interesting conversation, you’re not going to want to miss it.
Before we dive into that, MicroConf Remote is happening today, tomorrow and Thursday. Head to microconfremote.com if you’re interested in early stage B2B SaaS marketing approaches. We’re hearing from Gia Laudi, the co-founder of Forget the Funnel. We’re hearing from the CMO of Crisp, the founder of GymDesk on Capterra marketing, VP of marketing at SparkToro. I’m going to be doing a talk. It’s a fully remote event. It’s very inexpensive. It’s the cheapest MicroConf Remote we’ve ever done. We’re trying to make it accessible to as many people as possible. And even if you miss today, you’ll get the videos when the event ends. That’s microconfremote.com.
And with that, let’s dive into my conversation with Matt. Matt Wensing, thanks for coming back on the show.
Matt Wensing:
Hey Rob, good to see ya.
Rob Walling:
Yeah, it’s great to have you back. Folks know you as the founder of Summit, which is at useSummit.com. And you’ve been on this show, I don’t know, three, four, five times. We answered listener questions at one point, I think. We talked through enterprise sales, I think. And then we’ve talked about your journey with Summit, right? And how the initial launch and then you reroute the code base. And here we are again, this time talking about a pivot. And I’m on your homepage and the H1, gorgeous homepage by the way.
Matt Wensing:
Thank you.
Rob Walling:
Hired an outside designer for this, I assume?
Matt Wensing:
We did. We knew we needed it and they delivered, which was nice.
Rob Walling:
Yeah, it’s really attractive. Folks should check it out. Use Summit.com And the H1 is build low-code simulations, forecasts, calculators, and it’s still flipping. It says Summit Powers engaging apps for sales, marketing and product teams to deploy and use anywhere. Now the last time you were on the show, I would’ve described Summit as a forecasting tool for, originally it was for SaaS, but then I think it just became a forecasting tool for business. So this is different. And today we’re going to talk about how you’ve made that decision, the journey, what is it, 12, 18 month journey to get here. What was the impetus for not continuing to do the forecasting stuff? Was there something about it that wasn’t working?
Matt Wensing:
That’s a great question. Yes, there was. I think the short version is that we found that there’s a learning curve with the product. If you want to become a developer of apps on Summit, let’s put it that way. If you want to build calculators as that, H1 says there’s a learning curve. And that learning curve was really exacerbated by the fact that people would come to it and they would see this canvas, which was something you expect to see in a design tool, but not something you expect to see in a planning tool. You’re thinking, oh, it’s like a spreadsheet. And then we’d always have to explain to people. And no, it has the capabilities of a spreadsheet. But the nice thing is it’s laid out in this infinite canvas, which is much more like a whiteboard. So we used to call it a whiteboard that does math I think was our best positioning statement prior to now.
And through a lot of conversations we found out that while that was resonating with some, and I think that’s always tricky is that it’s working a little bit, that every time we tried to get someone excited to build it, they would get to the end of the road and go, okay, so then? What do I really have? And it’s like, well, you have a canvas, like a blueprint, you can share that with people. And so to answer your question, what wasn’t working was sort what you ended up building with Summit wasn’t a recognizable existing thing, it was a canvas blueprint simulation on a page thing that was completely novel. And there was a lot of chatter about this on startup Twitter, but it’s always this endless debate of a new product category versus an existing product category. And we were basically going down the new product category route, I would say a hundred percent with the whiteboard that does math because that just doesn’t exist yet.
We realized was we need to somehow get people in the position where they can create something that people recognize. And some people wake up every day and go, yeah, I’ve been thinking about that thing. In fact, I’ve tried to build one of those things before and if this is a cheaper, faster, better way to build that thing, then we’d solve that problem. But we just weren’t having enough people wanting to try something new and adopt that learning curve even though the tooling was so powerful. And I think you think about even a new programming language, you could have, I don’t know, go or elixir or pick your language. Sure, some people are going to learn that, but if you really want it to take off, you have to show the world what can you make with this that I need and I can’t make with other things very easily. So we didn’t have that and that was the irritation, if you want to put it that way, the lingering problem weakness that we had in our business was that lack of resonances on what do I make with this?
Rob Walling:
So then folks would be intrigued, they would try it out, they’d never completed the build or they’d complete the build and then be like, I don’t really know how to use this ongoing?
Matt Wensing:
One thing that was really encouraging and remains this way, is that people who want to invest in becoming Summit developers, it’s pretty binary. It’s people either latch onto it and absolutely love it, usually takes a couple breakthroughs, but they go that path. Or like you’re saying, I would say as high as maybe 90 out of a hundred people, they take the two Lego parts. They try to bonk them together, if they don’t click, it’s just not working for them. And that’s the same way as people trying any design tool or new language. It’s just some things fit people’s brains and some things don’t. And hey, if you’re hitting 5% of the population, that’s actually pretty good considering just how unique sometimes these things are in terms of I just don’t think this way. And so they would struggle and they would fall off.
But then what was funny is they still had the original problem. They still wanted to forecast their business, they still wanted to figure out if they needed to raise money, they still wanted to play with their pricing. So all these problems that I just love as a startup founder and it was very frustrating to go, well, wait a minute, why do you have to learn how to develop in this language just to get those benefits? We started to put these two and two together and go, well what if someone who’s already built a thing that does that could just share that with you? Could they publish it somehow and release it to the world and share it with you? Because you want to use something. And this person over here is one of those rare people that built a tool that does that, a thing that does that. How do we connect you two basically became the challenge.
And a lot of people want to read blog post, not everybody wants to write one. And so they were coming to us wanting answers and content and we were sort of telling them, well you got to write your own answers. And we were like, this is silly, why don’t we let people publish their work on Summit? But then it was like, okay, if you publish a Summit thing, what is it? What form does that take?
Rob Walling:
Got it. And that’s when you started calling them calculators because everyone knows what that is. And I’m on your templates page right now and I think most of these you have made you and your team have made to date.
Matt Wensing:
Yep.
Rob Walling:
There’s customer life cycle forecast, there’s a B2B sales pipeline forecast, acquisition and retention calculator, simple monthly savings, ROI calculator. So it’s not all startup based. I mean monthly savings is something a personal finance person would do, but it sounds like the way you’re talking about it, you don’t want to make all of them. You want third party devs to learn the Summit language in essence, which it isn’t technically language, is it? Or is it all drag and drop or do you need some coding ability to be able to build a calculator?
Matt Wensing:
So I would liken it to spreadsheets where you can as point and click, but you do end up typing little snippets of code. So that’s why we call it low code. And it’s a lot of spreadsheet like syntax. And again, that’s where this learning curve comes in and it fits some people’s brains really well. Other people it doesn’t. But it can be learned. And we do have a few hundred folks who know how to make these. We have people publishing new ones, actually we just had our first agency customer learn this as a low code agency tool and say, Oh I get it. We can build calculators for our clients. So that’s starting to happen. But the calculator word just ended up being so critical to solving this puzzle of what is it? And I struggle with that, honestly. That was not an easy word to decide on.
Rob Walling:
Because as you’ve said, you had whiteboard that does math, you had canvas. There are a lot of different words. I struggled with this back in the day. I remember not wanting to be an ESP, right? I was like, well no, drip sends behavioral email at the right time and it does all this stuff. And I kept describing to people what it did. And you know what? I was trying to invent my own category and that was dumb.
Matt Wensing:
Better to be the really amazing player in that calculator space than to invent a new thing, which everybody then has to invest so much mental energy in placing it in their brain. They’re like, but what is it? And I’ll tell you the other thing that bothered me. This sounds like maybe what bothered you too is calculator sounds diminutive, derogatory, just downplays it. You’re like, I mean, come on guys, that’s two plus two. We do so much more than that. And you come to this realization I think when you want to, and that’s sort the other part of this recent journey is when you want to go to market, finally you have to decide, am I going to resonate in appeal to most buyers and bite that bullet if you will, or go cross that step? Or do I want to remain, well this is for the early adopters, the cutting edge. And it’s punk rock, if you’re not into this, it’s not for you.
And it’s like, that’s great, but you’re not going to top the charts. You got to call it something that people wake up in the morning and say, I want that. And that was the proof. So we tried this calculator positioning, I think you probably even saw it in the tiny seed Slack I posted before we went live with the new site. It was like a last minute test, hey, does anybody want a calculator? Just blew up the responses. It was really exciting.
Rob Walling:
I’m going to bring it back to when I finally just threw up my hands and said [censored 00:10:49] it, drip is marketing automation that doesn’t suck. There was just a moment where I was like, I have to do this. Because I didn’t like marketing, I didn’t like the term, it felt so corporate, it felt enterprise. We weren’t that. But I realized we could be that but not be that. We could be the not marketing automation. And so it was a giving into it and it definitely, it allows a customer, you’ve already said it, but when they land on your homepage, they read your H1, what they’re thinking is how does this fit into my mental model of the world and of the software space? How is this something I already know? Is this MailChimp but with xyz? And so if you describe that we’re a whiteboard that does code, it’s like, or whiteboard that does math and we forecast, it’s like okay, I have a whiteboard and you literally have to scroll down.
But if you come to a site that says I can build simulations, I can build calculators, I can build this. At least it gets you part of the way there. You’re right, calculators does not fully describe what these are because when you look at them, they are very powerful. There is a lot more to these your templates than just being a, as you said, nine key calculator or whatever.
Matt Wensing:
Exactly. Exactly. And they’re not even calculators because I don’t think there’s a single one that says punch in nine then plus then three then equals or whatever. Really, they’re programs, they’re apps. But that’s too generic. And I think with positioning you end up having to find a word that gives people just the right grip on what you are and what you aren’t like. I think that was April Dunford’s key insight is that it’s the right words that get people to go, oh, you’re a database for sales and marketing leads as opposed to oh we’re this portal where you do stuff with sales. So calculator ended up being that unlock for us where yes, it’s deme, but based on the responses from all those founders, I think we had a dozen founders respond just to that thread, which I felt like was a pretty good hit rate of people who are even active in the channel on any given 24 hour period, we had 13 people reach out and go, “I’ve always wanted a calculator, we’ve tried to build calculators before. Turns out we needed a JavaScript developer, et cetera, et cetera.” And it was like all this latent frustration and lack of satisfaction with having built calculators in the past. And so we said, okay, this is what they are, this is what we’re going to call them. And then we get people’s attention. And that’s been the hard part.
Rob Walling:
This is actually makes things a lot clearer for me because when you posted in the Slack and you said calculators, I remember thinking, whoa, this is a big pivot. Is this even the same software? Is it the same coat? But now that you tell the story, it’s like, no, it was just what you said. People weren’t quite finishing. There was only a certain subset that want to build it. How can we make it available so as many people want to build can build and as many, many, many more people will want to use them. So therefore we have to make them embeddable and shareable, which is not a… it’s just an extension. This is not a pivot, but it is a repositioning. That’s the big thing, is the words changed.
Matt Wensing:
Definitely. Definitely repositioning. I think the other insight was if you want to make a tool, so ours is a maker tool, you can build stuff with it. If you have a tool like that, they need to be able to make things that people want to use. And that’s extremely reductive. It sounds silly when you say that, but the reason a calculator is exciting is yes, partly because makers recognize those as artifacts that they have seen before and they can make, but then they can also go, oh, I know someone who would use a calculator. They’re never going to want to make one themselves. But if I can make something other people can use, that’s cool. That makes me want to take the time and make the effort to learn how to build these. Because I can think of three people or 20 people or 300 people on my mailing list right now who would want to use a calculator and that’s good for me if they use something I make.
And so that’s the other thing about having a recognizable output is that now the people who make stuff, they know how to communicate that to their audience and say, hey, you think about MicroCon or anything else, hey now we have a runway calculator on our homepage. You can say that as opposed to what would you going to say before? Your audience is going to go, huh? I don’t know if I want to use that. So that was really important to use a term that not only made sense to the makers, but also the makers had confidence that their audiences would also know what the heck that was.
Rob Walling:
Yeah. And so you mentioned to me offline before we started recording that part of this process, this rethinking started when you hired this designer to design this killer homepage. I’ve already said it, but it’s really nice. I’m taken by it. I mean I see a lot of marketing sites for SaaS and there’s something about the fonts and the way it all lines up. I’m sure you paid a pretty penny for it.
Matt Wensing:
Yeah.
Rob Walling:
But what was that and that process you said led you down this thought process of maybe we do need to change things up. You want to tell us that story?
Matt Wensing:
Yeah, that’s worth telling. I’ll condense it down. So we actually thought it was going to be classic project mismanagement or over optimism maybe. We need a new website, we think we know what it’s going to say or we’ll figure it out what it’s going to say part. But the current site, the website we had before was practically fit in one browser window without scrolling. It had 20 words and some testimonials. That was just the movie trailer coming soon poster if you will, with the light saber and the dates. That was pretty much, that was it. It was a promise to ourselves.
And so we basically said, okay, we’re going to figure out the words, but we don’t want to do yet another site using off the shelf components. Pick your framework, let’s hire a designer, or an agency that can help us with that. And they turned out to be, we interviewed a few and they turned out to be strategic in addition to being good at design, which is a pretty rare combination. And the price was, it was pretty, but it wasn’t too many pennies. It was in our budget. We hired them, but they really got us.
And what I mean by that is I don’t think any of us really understood how much work we needed to do to really get that site to where it is today because we did have to go through the repositioning. And I would honestly say, if you can wait to do your new site until after you figure out your new positioning, do it. Because mixing those two together, this is actually the second or third version of a fully designed site that we went through. And the project, instead of taking four weeks took more like six or seven if I remember correctly, maybe eight by the time it was said and done. So it took a lot longer. It was still within budget because it was pretty, I mean it was ridiculous at first.
But the thing they had us do was they really, and I would encourage anyone to do this, just challenged us to tell the story that you need to tell to a before and after day in the life of a prospect. They come to your homepage, what’s the story? What’s the hero’s journey that you want to take that person on from beginning to end? And I’m like, oh, okay. Marketing cliche. But at the same time they talked about jobs to be done, why are they hiring this product? They just asked really deep questions. And I have to say, if they hadn’t done that, it was grueling. I mean, I think 75% of my mental energy and time for all of those weeks went to figuring out the site and the language and the positioning.
So it was a giant investment of company time, but going that deep is, it is the only reason we got the result we did. And so they took us through that journey and they were very patient to adapt as we realized, oh my gosh, they’re calculators, not simulations or whatever that next day’s epiphany was. But they were also good partners in the sense of pushing back on us when we would go a little bit too far and they would say, Okay, now you’re talking about your target audiences, developers in the traditional sense, I don’t think it is. I think low-code developers are probably your audience. Let’s try to stick with that. And so they were that keel right on the ship. But they also forced us to navigate some pretty crazy waters for two months.
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In the scheme of things, two months, I know it feels long while you’re doing it, but it’s pretty substantial result coming out of that time. Sounds very much worth the time investment.
Matt Wensing:
Yeah, it was, full stop. The other thing that we were doing at the time was when we started that journey, we actually didn’t have the published button in the app. So our developer was responding to the positioning changes that we just talked about in real time as well. So we said, and he actually was helping us think up these things like, well what if you could publish it and we put a wizzywig editor or a basic UI on top of it and it was like a calculator interface. This was really a team effort in that sense of going, okay, if we did that, then we would be able to let people publish these and then we could have a page where that thing lived and the user wouldn’t even have to be logged in. It just all came together.
But again, when things come together like that, the biggest risk was spinning and thank goodness was a small team because two months of spinning like that, I told the team this afterwards, if we were a team of 10 or 12 or 20, some people would’ve fallen off the merry go round at some point because they’re like, I just invested a week in this video tutorial. What do you mean we’ve added a publish button? And obviously they’re a good teammate, they’re going to suck it up and delete that, but part of only being able to navigate that in two months and come out the other side with a good result was we’re still a tiny, relatively tiny team working with an agency of two people and we all just had to talk it through and not waste any effort.
And that was probably the hardest part, Rob, was looking at some of our existing help center content, YouTube video tutorials, screenshots, all the marketing work we had out there and going, this isn’t just a change the logo, this is a delete a lot of the existing marketing content. If you do a good job with your positioning, you weave it into everything. And now you’re basically pulling on that route and everything just suddenly looks like, well, on this page you’re talking about building a profit and loss statement. That’s not a calculator. So we have to rewrite that and it guts you in a content sense, which is way more expensive than the… it is actually as expensive as the agency work, right?
Rob Walling:
Yep. And I mean, you called it out, but one of these massive dangers of these companies that raise venture and scale up and hire, you said 10, 20, but I mean think of in the payments space that e-com payments, it’s like bolt and fast were the two and one of them is at like 500 employees or 300 or something and they don’t have product market fit yet. And you have a dozen sales people, like you said, you have videographers, you have people writing marketing copy, you’ve done so much work and then you’re like, oops. Even if it’s not a pivot, if it’s a slight adjustment, it just wastes a lot of people’s time. It wastes a lot of money and it’s why funding should, not funding, but scaling up should come at that point where you have at least that modicum of confidence that you’re not going to have to dramatically change
Matt Wensing:
It. Right. And on that note, yeah, I think there’s virtues in raising some money as we’ve talked about before, but if you spend any amount of money you raise investing in things that you haven’t validated, you run that risk of having to decide to throw it away later. Which means it was a lesson, but it was an expensive lesson. And you’re right. I mean now salespeople, So I did this at my last company. We were were SMB long tail SaaS focus, mostly self-service inbound. And we pivoted completely all into enterprise sales. And we had some sales and marketing folks who either weren’t interested in that transition from a career standpoint because it just wasn’t exciting for them. Or selling a six figure enterprise deal is just a different skill set than answering a phone and selling somebody a $250 a month subscription.
But now you’re talking about lives and careers and that investment is a lot more painful. So yes, absolutely finding that fit first and staying small as you can. I could see a world where you either don’t make it obviously because you throw up your hands or you transition but you don’t fully transition and you half bake the transition and then you’re like, oh, the results aren’t great. Well yeah, that’s because 20% of your team really isn’t bought into it or didn’t update their collateral, so now you’re this two headed thing.
Rob Walling:
And so you’ve made this change and now folks can go and create templates, download calculators, they can embed them, they can do all that stuff. Which your team was kind of, you’re a couple devs, right?
Matt Wensing:
Yep.
Rob Walling:
You plus another. So it designed to be able to just roll with that to basically implement quickly. As you said, you figured out your positioning, you figured out which you want to do, and it’s like, oh [censored 00:25:05], we got to go write some code to now make that possible. But you did and you were doing it in real time. And you essentially, I’ll call it a relaunch, you relaunched it. Was it last month?
Matt Wensing:
Yeah, I think that was the first week of, I want to say August, was that early August?
Rob Walling:
Okay, so almost two months, not quite two months ago. And how is that going? What signals do you have about whether it’s resonating, how it’s resonating and even love to hear an example or two of folks who have either built or embedded the calculator and promoted to their audience or just something, a use case or two.
Matt Wensing:
Yeah. I think what this ultimately did is it enabled us to say yes to people who wanted to use things but not build them. That was the purpose of it. And so the best stories to me are the ones where somebody comes in, they find one of our templates or they find an existing app, they change the labeling, they change the colors, a couple things and then they just take it and they put it into there. So one great story, and this is actually pinned to the top of my Twitter at least today, got this email out of the blue. This person runs a mastermind group, I guess there’s some membership software that they use to run it. And he found a calculator that illustrates sales payback. So if you hire a new salesperson, how long does it take to pay back on that hire? Because you got to think about commissions and contract values.
Like you said, it’s not just a simple nine plus nine calculator. He took it, embedded it on their member’s website. And he just sent me a message, this is the coolest app I’ve used in a very long time. And I knew he didn’t build that. I knew he customized it a tiny bit. I’m not even sure about that, but I knew he went and got the in embed code and he put it on his page and he was super excited. And he might say like, Well, what’s in it for us? The other thing that’s in it for us is we decided the two brand, all of the free embedded calculators as Summit. So now in his membership site or portal, there’s this really awesome calculator doing these complex things with charts and everything else. And then there’s a very clear at the top says sponsored link to get calculators like this, go to Summit.
So he’s happy, he actually has a paid option if he wants to do it, which is to get rid of that sponsorship link and he can pay to white label it. And so he have that model there and it’s just working as designed and none of that friction of him going, well yeah, I’d love to have a calculator that helped our mastermind members understand sales better, but I’m not going to build one and I don’t even want to learn your tool to build one. Even though you’re telling me it’s easier, I just don’t have the time for that.
So that’s an example of just super low friction adoption of the tool that we built. And that’s enough for us to grow this business because we can monetize that. I think that’s the other thing to say. We’re not just saying publish for free, embed for free. There is ways to monetize that, but it skipped the whole challenge of him having to learn how to become a developer. And I think there’s, for every maybe a hundred of him, maybe a thousand of him is probably only one of the other. So now this market size is just much, much bigger. So that’s one example.
We also have content creators that folks know of. So we’re talking to some pretty popular SaaS metrics providers, not surprisingly to say we at blog posts all the time where we’re trying to show people things about retention or acquisition. Can we put a calculator in our blog powered by you guys? And absolutely, here’s one, it’s already built, copy paste. The gears are moving now. And I keep telling the team that we’re building momentum now around this and we had our highest traffic week ever last week including launch weeks. So for founders, you know what I mean? It’s like sure you had that spike but then you’re down into that trough. Being able to look at your floor now as being above where you’ve been before is just things are moving in the right direction. So it’s been good.
And people are also reaching out and saying, I understand now why I might want to learn this and build these because look at this usage. And so that’s nice too. It’s like, oh, can I build these and share them with my audience? Of course, you can do that. So it’s working and the revenue is up. We had our best revenue growth month to date last month, which was awesome. Churn is about the same. So from just a revenue growth standpoint, to see that plateau get broken is another one of those things you look for as a founder because it means something good has changed, right?
Rob Walling:
And on this show I often say don’t bootstrap two-sided marketplaces unless you already have one of the sides. And there’s so many things that you’re not bootstrapping a two-sided marketplace. Number one, you’re not bootstrapping, you have raised funding. And so that gives you some leeway. Number two, you get value out of this. You, being Summit, make money whether there is two sides to the marketplace because right now you’re building calculators and if people want to pay for it. So you are essentially handling the supply side for now. And that’s a nice advantage. If you started Uber, you couldn’t drive all the black cars, you can’t handle all the supply side, you need to… versus now you just need to generate demand and build that supply side until there’s a compelling reason and there’s enough builders that they start to contribute to the supply side. So do you see the bulk of this business or if we group flash forward three years, five years, that the real cash generated in this business is more of a marketplace style or is it still the SaaS? Because right now, so folks know as of this recording, there’s a free trial and then if you want to build stuff, it’s 24 a month, 249 a year. And that’s also if you want to remove branding, I’m assuming off of my calculators that I share and then there’s enterprise beyond that.
Matt Wensing:
Yeah. I see the majority of it coming from the marketplace and the embedding and the sharing. And the reason I say that is I like what you pointed out about Uber, we talk about marketplaces and then we always want rules of thumb. So I agree with you. One of the things we had to wrestle with here before we made this move was what are the ratios, right? If this is Uber, then I need a certain number of drivers for what, couple of riders. It’s a very tough ratio and the other marketplaces might need one to one. Those are hard to cold start or bootstrap because you need almost as many of the hard part as you do of the other, and that’s very difficult to scale. So Uber was, what were they doing? They were subsidizing the heck out of driver earnings just to get drivers out on the road.
Well we realized with this was, wow, if Matt can build a calculator a day, which is the pace I was on a couple weeks ago, and those calculators can each be used by thousands and thousands, potentially hundreds of thousands of people, there’s no limit to the number of people that can use them, then that’s a very high leverage activity. That’s like one Uber driver being able to drive around the state of Florida. That’s absurd. But if that’s the case, then this is easier to cold start and it’s easier to build. And I think looking at those ratios is really important. So I think this ends up looking more like I’m a gamer, at least try to be when I’m relaxing. I think this has more of a gamer marketplace shape to it where for every handful of people who want to be a game developer, you have potentially millions of people who just want to play games. And that’s a lot easier to start then.
And if you’re the publisher, if you’re a Nintendo, you’re like, sure, we can charge a licensing fee to build Nintendo games. But ultimately, and that’s just sort of paying for the software, maybe the customer support and stuff. But ultimately it’s the game players who are going to foot the bill by paying for usage and by looking at ads or whatever the model is. That’s how we’re going to make our money is by selling a million copies of Mario Brothers. But for now, we’ll make Duck Hunt, we’ll make Mario Brothers, we’ll make Zelda, we’ll make the hits and eventually more developers will come online and realize, oh, I want to make something too. So that’s where I see it going. And so we’re focused right now on usage and traffic and the embeds and the sharing because I believe that’s part of the market is much, much, much bigger than I want to be a developer. We need those. But I think even if we had 20, 30, 50 dedicated developers, that’s a lot of the games, if you will, that are getting created monthly or weekly for any platform. Right?
Rob Walling:
And building the demand side is sounds like really what…
Matt Wensing:
Is actually the harder. Yeah, that’s actually the more important part is there’s plenty of talented developers in low code, especially, developers out there. What was important for us was to prove to them that if you build something using this platform, it’s going to get used. It’s like saying, hey come drive for us, they’ll be riders. You need that driver to say, prove it. Prove me that there’s going to be riders because I don’t want to just sit in an empty car and not making any money. So we really need to prove the demand, but I’m for now sort of the driver. We have a couple others, but that can work just given the dynamics.
Rob Walling:
Very cool. Sir, you are Matt Wensing on Twitter. If folks want to follow you and of course usesummit.com if they want to hear about what we’ve been chatting about today. Thanks for joining me.
Matt Wensing:
Thanks Rob, appreciate it.
Rob Walling:
Thanks again to Matt Wensing for joining me this week. And thank you for coming back this week and every week listening to Startups For the Rest of Us. It really means a lot. It means a lot that this audience is growing and it means a lot to me how many folks are mentioning Startups Pod on Twitter, mentioning this in Reddit, Hacker News, all the places. Thank you so much. This is Rob Walling signing off from episode 633.