Episode 705 | From Bootstrapped to Mostly Bootstrapped to Venture Backed

Rob Walling:
Another week, another episode of Startups For the Rest of Us. I’m your host, Rob Walling. This week I talk with Braden Dennis, the co-founder of FinChat about their long journey of launching a product with an existing audience. And in fact, if you’ve ever heard me quote the stat that of all the companies I’ve invested in, 170 companies, that less than 5% of them had an audience before they launched their SaaS. FinChat is one of them. And you’ll hear Braden and I talk about the pros and cons of having that audience in this episode. In addition, they also launched a second product and pivoted the entire company to that second product. They’ve been bootstrapped, mostly bootstrapped, and now, they’ve raised venture funding. He and his co-founders have taken a lot of big risks and made big bets, and they’re doing pretty well with it. It’s a really interesting conversation today. I hope you stick around. 

Before we dive into that, I want to let you know it’s your last chance to get tickets to MicroConf Atlanta. The event is April 21st through the 23rd. Speakers include Rand Fishkin from SparkToro, Asia Orangio from DemandMaven, Stephen Steers, myself, and Dr. Sherry Walling. It’s going to be hosted and emceed by me and Lianna Patch of Punchline Copy. I’m also going to be doing a fireside chat with Ben Chestnut, the co-founder of MailChimp. He does not do very many public appearances, and so I’m very excited to host him at MicroConf this year. Microconf.com/us, if you’re interested in grabbing tickets. Again, tickets are going to sell out soon. So if you’re thinking about joining me and about 225 of your closest bootstrap founder, friends, head to microconf.com/us. 

MicroConf is hiring a director of marketing and operations. You can come work directly with me to help me refine, and expand, and execute on our growth strategy. We have a lot of exciting things going on over the next one to two to three years, frankly, at MicroConf, including a lot of new digital product launches. So if you have a strong background in online marketing, marketing digital courses, course creation, managing a small team and you’re interested in working directly with me to help shape the future of bootstrapped and mostly bootstrapped SaaS companies, head to microconf.com/jobs and you’ll see the listing for this as well as our community manager opening. If you’re interested, please apply and let’s have a conversation. And with that, let’s dive into my conversation with Braden. 

Braden, welcome to the show.  

Braden Dennis:
Rob, it’s so good to be here.  

Rob Walling:
So FinChat.io is your company. You started it with three co-founders. Your H One is the complete research platform for global equities. Do you want to give us an idea of where you stand today, what phase the business is at.  

Braden Dennis:
For sure. So we are a team of 11 people, soon to be 12 in a few days. Seven figures in ARR company, and the platform is for investment research. So we primarily serve professional, sophisticated institutional investors. And we’ve been going more and more kind of upmarket through that process.  

Rob Walling:
And you’ve raised a million and a half seed. Would you call it a seed or a pre-seed round?  

Braden Dennis:
Yeah. I guess, there’s no rules in raising money is one thing I’ve learned. I almost say that it was like a hybrid of a seed and a series A in terms of where we were in scale, but it was a tool for us to get to our next milestones. And we didn’t need more, we didn’t need less. It just felt like a really good number for us.  

Rob Walling:
We’re going to talk about a lot of things today. Building a second product, raising your round, venture versus bootstrapping. ‘Cause you’ve been through a lot in the past couple of years. I want to start by going back to when FinChat was initially launched, it was actually called Stratosphere, right? Stratosphere.io. And you have, is it one of the most popular personal finance podcasts in Canada? You started with an audience, and you built a SaaS, and one reason I want to touch on this is if folks follow me on Twitter or listen to me rant on this podcast, I often say, “Look, if you have an audience, great. That is a great advantage. But if you don’t, don’t go build one for SaaS.” If you’re going to do info products, or courses, or books, of course. But for SaaS, I think it’s more trouble than it’s worth and the time would be better spent doing SEO, or product development, or anything else. But roll us back there. Tell us about your podcast and then how Stratosphere came out of it.  

Braden Dennis:
Well, first I wholeheartedly agree with that sentiment. The podcast network owns two shows, and so I do run it as a separate business. It is an advertising business. If I was to dream up the best lifestyle business, it is truly that. It’s like a few hours of work each week. And I’ve been doing it now for a long time. I was looking at it the other day and I’ve been doing podcasts in various forms for 10 years now. And when we launched it for a while, there was basically no one listening. And then in 2019, since it was about investing, it was starting to take off. But it was taking off right before the big wave brought us even bigger in 2020 when people were doing self-directed investing. And so it’s been a fantastic project, it’s been every single week for 370 episodes now. So I think we’re about half of your catalog.  

Rob Walling:
It’s still a lot, man. Good for you.  

Braden Dennis:
But you can recognize that it is a grind, but I really do enjoy it. I get a lot of career satisfaction out of it. And then to roll that over to the product, to what you said, I say to people, “It gave me a great zero to one type of audience to show the product to, iterate on. Have like really forgiving users for your MVP was great, and I don’t take that for granted. I think it’s amazing to have that. But you do outgrow that audience, and as a business we outgrew it pretty quick because we are starting to focus on more upmarket B2B type clients. And so it gave us a great zero to one, but it is not going to be the thing that gets you 1 to 10 or anything like that. So I agree that it shouldn’t be a main priority for SaaS founders.  

Rob Walling:
And so you had this audience and it’s self-directed investors, kind of people interested in personal finance and investing and you built a SaaS. And what was it, was it like researching stocks?  

Braden Dennis:
It was the tool that I wish I had to save me time for the podcast research essentially, which was just how can I aggregate more historical financials from public companies across the whole world into one place that I can view them really quickly. And the whole concept was just like Yahoo Finance people were really familiar with, but it’s so ad invested and just really limited coverage. And just only has huge scale because they’ve been so good at SEO, and anytime someone searches up a company or a stock, they come up first. But I was trying to build just the MVP of how can I bring in financials from companies around the world in some sort of API feed, and then build Yahoo Finance on steroids to show my podcast audience. It was not some grand vision or product plan really.  

Rob Walling:
Right. And you mentioned you built it, you launch it, people are using it. You decide to go up market. Why was that?  

Braden Dennis:
Well, for all the reasons that you talk about in this podcast, anytime you have really low-price products, you face a lot of churn. It’s really, really hard to scale something when people are paying nine bucks a month, which was the original plan. Right? And so this should come to your listeners as no surprise that as a founder, it’s your job to learn and iterate. Your first plan is never going to be the concrete plan, and our plan right now moving forward is not going to be the plan in two, three years. It’s literally our job to iterate as we go. And so that’s kind of how we found ourselves here.  

Rob Walling:
Got it. And so the audience, as you said, was your zero to one, it got you started. And if I recall, we first talked when you were somewhere around 7 to 10K MRR. And I believe you had gotten bigger, and churn had done some damage ’cause again, $9 a month is, as you said, it’s hard to scale even when you have access to tens of thousands of people or whatever through a podcast. And it was maybe a year later, so I’m thinking, when did you think about start for the rest of his drinking game? When did you think about launching a second product? Because you and I talked about it and usually, as Ruben Gomez and I had spent an entire episode talking about… Usually my response is, “Don’t do that,” and you have to convince me otherwise, right? But you guys did and you executed on it really intelligently. 

I believe I actually used you as an example in that episode of people who had talked me into it. You were one, Jordan Gaul and I think there was a third. But walk us through that in how maybe ChatGPT going live had an impact on your thinking.  

Braden Dennis:
For sure. So the product was called Stratosphere, the company that we originally connected on and got into TinySeed with. Like you said, for context, around seven K in MRR at the time. Lots of churn… Growing, but not a venture scale idea or anything like that. And in the April-ish of 2023, last year, one of my co-founders was like, “We have been aggregating so much financial data. This product’s amazing. What happens if you just talk to it?” We had heard whispers of Bloomberg, the large incumbent trying to build BloombergGPT, but they just have a white paper. What if the small startup beats them to their game? And we did, and it went viral. And so we launched it, we bought the [inaudible 00:10:24]… I couldn’t have bought a domain name faster than FinChat because it was perfect, right? It was the domain for the space. And we launched it in April, and we had 65,000 signups on hour 46 or something of it being live. 

It had gone viral on LinkedIn, it had made its way around Twitter and stuff like this. And it had far surpassed just my reach. That’s when you really know. And we recognized, like, “Okay, this product’s cool. But everything behind it, investors want to know the source.” So when you search up, like, “What was Amazon’s revenue last year?” People want to know the source, and audit it, and go back to the filing that it came for. If people are doing this, especially at a professional scale, I was like, “Perfect. We already built that product. It’s called Stratosphere.” So we brought that in as the layer behind it, and it became one cohesive product. So it was more so just like we built two different styles of front ends and then realized, “Hey, if we just bring them together, this is actually the most compelling product that the market has right now.” 

And it was a scary decision. You and I talked about it. And we decided in an afternoon, we’re like, “This is too obvious.” Right? Like “This is too obvious, and there’s no sense of waiting another day to think about it because this is amazing.” There’s no risk in terms of we don’t have to dish the old product, we’re going to merge it over. And so I think I call it the low-risk experiment gone right, because we shipped that experiment in three weeks. I think it was like two to three weeks, we shipped it from zero to one to domain to live to 65,000 users in two and a half weeks. And so that’s really the key is if that took us four months, oh, gosh, that would’ve been a gigantic distraction at that time.  

Rob Walling:
Yep. And that’s the thing that I see with a lot of folks who do launch that second product is they’re launching it to escape. Usually, it’s to escape something that’s not working and they’re not putting in the hard work on the first thing. And then they take four months, five months, six months to build it, and launch it. And they think about it, and then it is not. You called it what a low-risk experiment gone right, it becomes a high risk experiment. And whether it goes wrong or right, now, you’re six months down the line and you have something that most people won’t have had the intersect. And you had hard work, luck, and skill that all took this. I don’t want anybody to think, “Oh, Braden got lucky. Stratosphere got lucky with FinChat.” It’s like, “No, it was all these things.” Because you launched it in two to three weeks, it wasn’t 30, 40 hours of dev. Somebody put in a lot of hours, your co-founder. 

And the skill, let’s talk about skill. That’s kind of how your preparation, it’s like, “Hey, you guys had the knowledge. You guys had the data.” Without all the data you pulled into Stratosphere, there is no FinChat. That makes sense. I couldn’t have built FinChat on my own in two to three weeks because I didn’t have all the background that you guys had. So I’m calling this out, so listeners who are listening don’t think to themselves, “Oh, well I can launch a second product too.” You are again a counter example, but with good reason because you could do it quickly. And it was a low-risk experiment that if it didn’t go right, you would’ve kept pushing on Stratosphere. Right? So FinChat took off in a way… It wasn’t just users, right? I mean, it was people clamoring for the data and you were like, “Wow, there’s revenue here whether we’re going to close it today or in a month.” 

And so you eventually just merged them. And so if you go to Stratosphere.io now, it redirects you to FinChat, right? And it tells you, “We’ve merged your account settings and dashboards onto FinChat.” Was that part a hard decision at all to merge it in? Was it like, “Well, do we shut it down? Do we run two products?” What was the thinking there?  

Braden Dennis:
Because we knew we were going to roll in that product with the exact same UI, UX experience other than the background, gray is a little bit different. It was an identical experience for those previous users and that’s why we felt really confident. And we even told people, like, “Hey, this is happening.” A lot of people replies on my Twitter being like, “Dude, no. I love the Stratosphere units interface.” And I said, “I promise you. When we launch this tomorrow, I’m going to reply to this thread and be like, ‘See'” And that’s exactly what I did. And they’re just like, “You know what? It’s actually better. You tweaked a few little things that actually improved it.” And as we should, right? As you get a chance to put a fresh coat of paint on stuff. But we didn’t change the experience and that’s really why our users were like, “Okay, the domain’s different. The URL is different. And now, I have all these new features with the AI chat as well.” It’s a no-brainer.  

Rob Walling:
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Why do you think FinChat worked so well so quickly? ‘Cause you had a product… Stratosphere is similar. As you said, the interface was similar, right? There’s a lot of similarities between the two. But it’s a great split test, and you think about in any 10 successes or 10 failures, like, “Was it the founder? Was it the market? Was it the product? What are those magic factors that all come together?” I summarize them as hard work, luck, and skill, but we know it’s very amorphous. You had two similar products in one just up into the right. I’ve seen the graphs. Do you have any sense of why that happened the way it did?  

Braden Dennis:
Before, we were not truly bringing anything differentiated to the market to professionals. We were bringing something differentiated to the market for retail investors who hadn’t had a chance to get a professional accessible research interface. But for those who have been in the business a long time, paying 25 grand a year for each Bloomberg terminal. These incumbents have been building this technology for 30, 40 years and they’ve kind of thought of every use case. And so the expectation for those users is just so much higher. And now, it was something different. Now, I don’t even have to go learn Bloomberg 2.0 as I can just talk to it the same way that I talk to my associate or the intern to pull up a graph comparing these two companies. It’s like, “Hey, can you quickly compare Google Cloud’s business to Amazon Cloud’s business? Build a chart and also, layer in operating margins ’cause I want to know why there’s such a big discrepancy in profitability.” Those are very casual conversations that happen in the office for these people. And then they’re just like type it into FinChat and it creates it. 

And they just had this magical experience for the first time. And so I think differentiation is a roundabout way of saying that it was different for the first time and the timing was right. So I think that that’s probably what it comes down to.  

Rob Walling:
Timing feels like a big piece that people… Everyone’s talking about GPTs, and AI, and LLMs and so it’s going to tend to get noticed at least. And look, if it got noticed and it wasn’t a great product, then it doesn’t go anywhere. Right? As people look at it and blah. But it really is taking advantage of a moment in time that you were at the right place and seized the opportunity. You saw the opportunity, you seized it. You did it quickly. And you rode that wave is what it feels like, right? And sometimes, this is where I always say there’s some luck involved because you weren’t lucky in going viral. You were lucky in the sense that GPT just came out the moment that you had this product. Let’s say you had built Stratosphere five years ago, seven years ago, what were the tech waves that it was AR/VR and it was crypto. Maybe you’d have done a blockchain strategy, whatever. 

It’s like you did happen to have that, but you also had the ability to execute so fast that led you to raise your funding ground that we talked earlier. So you took money from TinySeed, right? So you’ve been bootstrapped. You’ve been, what I call, mostly bootstrapped, which is like, I don’t know, 100 grand to 500 grand is kind of mostly bootstrapped, usually. There’s no fine line, but that’s kind of in my head what I think about. And then now, you’ve literally raised venture. You want to talk us through that decision because as a entrepreneur, self-made with your podcast, and you’ve bootstrapped that, we know that you could have bootstrap Stratosphere/FinChat. But you decided to go in between and then take the full step. So talk us through your thinking there.  

Braden Dennis:
And what feels like a short time, I know it’s been several years now. I’ve seen all three of that bootstrapped, mostly bootstrapped, and going venture scale. And even on the same company, which is kind of even more bizarre. But there’s a couple pieces there, right? I say to founders who are thinking about raising money and you mentioned that, what is it 1, 9 and 90 rule? What is that one again? That’s the 1% should go venture.  

Rob Walling:
Should at least consider venture, they’re probably venture ready. And then about 9%, I think, should consider some type of funding ’cause it just makes it a little easier to get off the ground. And that maybe is angel friends and family, maybe it’s TinySeed type money, but it’s non venture money. And then I think about 90% of tech companies, startups, and stuff should probably just bootstrap. And again, you and I talked, it’s directionally correct. It’s not the exact numbers, but yeah, probably 10 times more should do this and 10 times more should do that.  

Braden Dennis:
Yeah, those kind of rule of thumb directionally correct things. I think that this one’s spot on, and it’s just kind of important to be honest with yourself because along that way… What we’ve actually described, the whole genesis of this. When it was a product for my audience, it was a bootstrapped business. It was not even a mostly bootstrapped business, it was fully… This is a cool side project turned main time project that we could generate a decent living for ourselves, basically. It’s not going to support a big team or anything like that, but a good bootstrap project. Two things are actually really working, we had a successful pivot up market to, “Okay, this is not a venture idea. But this could hit 1 million in ARR, maybe two,” that kind of thing. And so we were being honest with ourself about what that outcome looked like. And I even had angels and VCs reach out and I just said, “Look, I’m not getting on the venture route because this isn’t a venture company.” 

I’m an investor myself, it’s my job to be a steward of your capital. I became investor first before company operator. And then when FinChat happened and that explosion happened, our ambitions grew with the opportunity of recognizing it. If you were to see me and my co-founders call about level setting around the ambitions that we wanted to go to, they changed in a massive way in six months. In terms of what we thought was possible, the company we wanted to build, and the company that we thought that there was an opportunity on. So it’s really just being honest with yourself because if you put yourself in the wrong path for your ambitions, or the company, or the market opportunity, you get a lot of conflicting incentives with investors, yourself, what you want to build. And that’s not really good for anyone, no one wins in that situation. And when you’re raising money, I now, am a steward of capital and it’s my fiduciary duty to go for a big outcome. And so that’s what we’re going to do.  

Rob Walling:
Often, when I talk to folks similar who ask me, “Should I raise funding?” I know that you get that question. I tell them, “Look, there’s no right or wrong answer. Know what you’re getting into at each layer. Know that it’s not undoable. Once you take venture, especially like you’re on the venture track, you’ve removed some optionality and that’s okay. Just know that.” So in my case, if I were thinking about it, I can stay bootstrapped for as long as I want. I have all the options. The moment I take any capital, whether it is from a TinySeed, or friends and family, or angels, or whatever, I’ve made a choice. I can no longer be bootstrapped, I have now made that choice and it’s a one-way door. And then once you do venture, it’s similar. So that’s where bootstrapping as long as you can, as long as it makes sense. I think it gives you, not only the optionality, but I can help you discover about the business. Some businesses you’re two, three years in and finally you’re like, “Oh, now, I see there’s a venture opportunity.” Sometimes it takes that long. 

But if you took venture or you took a big round of funding early on, three months in where you’re still trying to find product market fit, you just burn through that cash. You’ve removed your optionality and you’re now like, “Well, I got to grow fast, so I got to spend all this money.” And then finally, a product market fit, no money in the bank. Right? So that’s why I tend to be pretty pro bootstrapping, not just because I don’t see venture as an incredibly viable option, I’ve never been anti venture, but I just think too many people think it’s the default. When I say 1, 9, 90, I want people to have an order of magnitude of when I speak at events, and I say that, people are surprised. I thought everyone raised venture. No, and everyone shouldn’t, right?  

Braden Dennis:
It’s ’cause those are the big headlines you see and those are the kind of vanity metrics that a lot of founders, especially in certain areas are showing off. Raising money in itself is not a milestone, it’s a tool. I love the Craig from Castos, it’s a tool to live in the future. Like that’s exactly… I don’t think I’ve heard of a better saying on what funding is ’cause in itself, it’s not a milestone. It doesn’t create any intrinsic value. And in fact, it might be destructive for intrinsic value for any potential for you to have a successful exit or outcome. Because if you try to sell it for less than what the cap you raised at, then there’s a lot of issues with that, especially if you’re signing traditional venture capital documents, you sign over a lot of control. You create a board, you create… it’s not a milestone, it’s really not. It’s a tool and decision for the company you want to build.  

Rob Walling:
Yep. I often tell people “It’s not the finish line, it’s the starting line. It’s a new starting line.” I’m like, “Okay. Now, we’re going to scale up.”  

Braden Dennis:
And to add on that, it’s one of the only irreversible mistakes is messing up your cap table.  

Rob Walling:
That’s for sure. We’ve seen some come through TinySeed, man. Where it’s like, “Wait-”  

Braden Dennis:
We fail, we make mistakes daily. It’s like in our culture to fail, to ship fast, to move fast, to fail fast. That’s the only thing you can’t mess up is your cap table.  

Rob Walling:
Yeah, it’s so permanent. When we got on the call today, you and I were chatting beforehand. And I had this whole outline of like, “Oh, let’s cover these things. I think these are the most interesting parts of your story so far.” And something you said to me is, “I just made a really hard decision as the CEO of this company and it’s to shut down our API business.” So do you want to give folks context around, you have a web interface, you have an API, and you’ve had a lot of traction with the API. But I believe yesterday, you just decided we’re not accepting new customers. Right? Just talk us through that decision because it’s a hard one. Being a founder is making hard decisions with incomplete information, it’s a big strategic decision. But it sounds like you’re convinced it’s the right way to go.  

Braden Dennis:
Yes. And to give you even more context, I basically realized the writing was all on the wall yesterday and made the decision this morning. That’s how quick I’ve had to make the decision. And some people say, “Maybe sleep on it. Maybe that’s too impulsive.” But as founders, we’re seeing signals for months, and months, and months, and months. It’s not like crap at the fan yesterday, I’m shutting it down today. Right? That’s that founder gut decision and making the decision fast and concisely. Whether it’s wrong or right, you’re going to navigate and you’re going to move forward with it, I think, is really important. ‘Cause the writing’s been on the wall for this for a while. Say six months ago, we saw a lot of interest from fintechs on, “Hey, can we bring FinChat into our platform?” Say, you’re like a broker, a stock trading platform. You’re like the Robin Hood of country X, Y, and Z. 

And we learned the wrong lesson really quick, which was huge six figure deals, quarter million… We signed a deal for a quarter million dollars a year. And for us, we grew up selling $9 a month subscriptions. This is star struck. We hit gold. This is product market fit. The inbound is exceptional, and so we ran with it. What we learned over the next six months and up including until this morning is every deal was very custom. The sales cycle, it was not just slow, it was impossible with the legalities around it, them being so regulated. And our ability to actually execute something that we’re really proud of, we became consultants. And what that did for a team of, at the time, seven, eight now, 12 people, is you completely lose focus on the company that we wanted to build. We know we still want to go up market. We tasted up market, we like it. We like going up market and we learned some good lessons, but we know it’s just not going to be that product. So we decided we’re not taking any more inbound for this. 

Also, I’ve had probably the worst six months of my whole time building this company during that time, and my co-founders agree. Even though we’re making lots of money from it, we were really not enjoying that part of it and we were really stressed out that we were going to be able to deliver that at scale. And so we just said, “Screw it.” There’s a larger opportunity upmarket for an enterprise option here on the FinChat platform, not off platform, which is way more scalable and it’s something we actually know we’re good at. So that’s kind of like my thought process around here, but the learnings and decision making at speed, I think, are what has gotten us here and will continue to get us forward in the future.  

Rob Walling:
Yeah, that’s a good way to summarize it is learning and decision making at high velocity, high speed. Einar Vollset and I talk often about what do the TinySeed founders that we talk to have in common, the ones that are really doing well. And there’s a decisiveness, there is doing a lot of things quickly. And usually, for the most part, working on the right things. Maybe it’s not 100%, but maybe it’s 75 or 80. And if you’re doing enough things at high velocity, something’s going to catch. And that is something that you and your team are exceptional at. And I don’t actually know if it’s you or if it’s your team ’cause I don’t see the inner workings of… You have three co-founders, we’re actually going to talk about that in a second. So four of you total. And the thing I’m surprised by, I’ll say this, let’s dive into the four-co-founder thing. 

One of the things we talk about in TinySeed or even just in MicroConf that we see in state of independent SaaS is that I believe the number is 90% of our MicroConf TinySeed crew is one or two-person companies, which makes sense. One or two co-founder companies, I should say. And then it’s another handful… It might even be more than 90. Actually, it might be like 92, and then there’s like 5% that are three co-founders. And then just one or two that are four people. Because usually, if you get four people together, they don’t make decisions quickly. There’s too many cooks in the kitchen, right? And there are other things that are, not a mess, but there are other things that make it an antipattern or an exception to what we see. 

That hasn’t been the case with you, with FinChat, with Stratosphere. Is that there are four of you, but it seems like you function pretty well, at least from the outside. And it seems like you move very quickly, you make decisions fast. And also, you execute very quickly. Right? Talk us through that sentiment of why start it with four? How has it worked out? And would you do that again? Just all your thinking around it.  

Braden Dennis:
Great questions. Well, first of all, my co-founders, there’s four of us, and these guys are my best friends, including my CTO, who we’ve literally been best friends since we were 10 years old. And so we have kind of complete alignment, and when I get everyone on a call this morning for making this hard decision, it’s just like, “Yeah, of course.” Like “Of course.” We’ve been in it, we’ve been involved. There’s no one catching up on the crap that’s been hitting the fan. There’s no one that’s just tuning in for the first time on making a really hard decision. And I think that that’s really important, just constant communication, constant talking. And one thing that we do is we have a monthly set founders call, which is important because it’s four of us. But every few months, sometimes more if it’s called for… I just call the guys together and just get a realignment of what we want in terms of an outcome. For those three different stages of raising money, not raising money, kind of raising money, it’s like, “What do you guys really want?” 

Because if we’re not all aligned on that, then you’re going to run into a lot of problems. Even if it’s just two co-founders, even… Four co-founders, three co-founders, two co-founders, you got to be aligned on what you really want to build in terms of the company size. Do you want 100 employees. Or do you want zero employees? These are really important decisions to think about before you start building. I just think we get along so great. Everyone has their own really unique talents to offer. At the end of the day, as my role as CEO, they’re leaning on me to make the hard decisions. And have built that trust over a long time that they know I’m going to do, at least, what I believe is the right thing.  

Rob Walling:
And what’s the distribution of work? ‘Cause one of your co-founders is a CTO, as you said. So we know he’s writing code and building stuff. And you’re the CEO, so you’re doing, I’m guessing, operations and a lot of the decision making and driving it forward. Sales calls too, it sounds like?  

Braden Dennis:
Lots of that. Too many of that.  

Rob Walling:
Well, can you ever do too many sales calls?  

Braden Dennis:
Check out my calendar and maybe. Yeah.  

Rob Walling:
What do your other two co-founders do?  

Braden Dennis:
So Adrian’s our COO, he’s done a lot of operations. He helped build out that data team. Since he’s an accountant, he was the perfect fit. I’ve been actually moving over a lot of the operations to unlock more of my time to him to move into a more COO type role. And then Kevin is chief product officer. But him and Ryan are basically CTO one and CTO two. That’s how it works. So two developers that are technical and have a deep understanding, but also have a lot of chops for people skills and building teams. They like that stuff and they’re good at it, so it’s helpful.  

Rob Walling:
Braden Dennis, you are BradoCapital, B-R-A-D-O Capital on Twitter. And FinChat.io is what you’re building. Thanks so much for joining me, man. It was a great conversation.  

Braden Dennis:
No, thanks for having me. I’ve been listening to the podcast for… Oh, shoot. I don’t know. Years and years, and I’ve enjoyed it very much. So happy to be here.  

Rob Walling:
Yeah, it’s great to have you on this side of the mic. 

Thanks so much to Braden for showing up this week and giving his time to help educate the mostly bootstrapped founder community. If you haven’t checked out our YouTube channel, it’s youtube.com/microconf. I’m releasing a new video there every week. It is completely custom created, bespoke, as they might say across the pond. And it’s different content. It’s similar to the podcast, but it’s tighter focus, right? It’s 10 or 15 minutes focused on a single topic, and it’s like having a second podcast. That’s youtube.com/microconf if you want to check it out. Thank you for listening. This is Rob Walling, signing off from episode 705.