Episode 739 | Selling SaaS to Customers Who Don’t Know They Have a Problem

Rob Walling:
Welcome back to another episode of Startups For, the Rest, Of Us. I’m your host, Rob Walling. In this episode, I talk with Andy Kim. He’s the co-founder, co-owner of a SaaS app called Rado that’s at Trot two. Andy acquired the majority of the business from the original developer that built it, and rado is in an interesting position in the sense of once they acquire customers, their retention is extremely high. But most people who need the tool are either unaware they have a problem or problem aware, but they’re not even solution or product or most aware. And we talk about that dynamic in the show of how difficult that can be and how it can be a bit of a headwind to get over. But to Andy’s credit, he’s making progress and growing the business month to month and has figured out some interesting approaches for getting around that. 

Before we dive into the episode, I have a Kickstarter that’s launching a week from today. It’s for my new book that I co-wrote with my wife, Dr. Sherry Walling. A book is called Exit Strategy, the Entrepreneur’s Guide to Selling Your Business Without Regret. Sherry and I have taken our combined many, many years of experience going through exits, counseling founders, through exits, and it’s not just focused on SaaS, it’s all types of businesses, but obviously there’s a light emphasis on SaaS because of course we do have more of a network in the space. But if you’d consider backing the Kickstarter, you can head to exit strategy book.com and click back the Kickstarter button and we will be in touch the moment it goes live. Could really use your support first. 24 hours is a great signal to everyone that if there’s a lot of backers, then we tend to get more. So exit strategy book.com if you’re interested in that. And with that, let’s dive into my conversation with Andy. Andy Kim, welcome to the show. Hey,  

Andy Kim:
Thanks for having me.  

Rob Walling:
Yeah, thanks for joining me today, man. So you run rado, that’s Trot two, and the H one is easy and secure. Go links, quickly share and remember links by shortening lengthy URLs. Try for free. the hell is a GoLink?  

Andy Kim:
That’s a good question. So most people probably have not heard of a GoLink, but the way to think of it is a UR L shortener. The consumer version of this is Bitly or Tiny URL, but GoLink specifically only work for people within the same organization. So whereas you would use Bitly to shorten our URL for marketing purposes to the general public where anyone can click on that link, goal links only work if you and I work at the same company. And the purpose is really to share resources between each  

Rob Walling:
Other. Got it. So folks understand you are a SaaS, you charge per seat, right? Per user. And when I think of Bitly and what was the other one, tiny URLI think of these big kind of freemium, consumer cheap plays, but you are much more on the enterprise side.  

Andy Kim:
Yep.  

Rob Walling:
Isn’t that right? Okay. So talk us through how that, it’s like two sides of a different coin.  

Andy Kim:
Yeah, and if you remember, Rob, when we were actually interviewing for TinySeed, you were questioning why do companies even pay for this, right? It’s an interesting phenomenon, but the reality is this is what I call enterprise software tool that works. The larger the company is, the larger the problem becomes. So there’s really three use cases I’d say, and then individual use. But the way that we break it down between those three, sometimes there’s good overlap, but really the fundamental problem is, hey, Rob sent me a resource three months ago and I don’t remember where he sent it, email Slack. He might have told me over a video conference, but Go Links basically helps you remember where to go because a human readable link most of the time, that’s a lot easier to recall.  

Rob Walling:
Got it. So as an example, then if I wanted to implement Go Links in for TinySeed, I would install a browser plugin, and then I sign into my Go Links account as a TinySeed employee. And there’s what is TinySeed team? Six or seven of us. So six or seven of us would all sign in, and then I can type in to my browser. Let’s say I’m in Chrome TinySeed dot com slash some internal short code, like a R’S deck. And we know an R’S deck is the deck. That is not a great example, but some type of short code. And now that has to then point somewhere, right? It points to a Dropbox location or some URL doesn’t store the files themselves. It literally is just a hop.  

Andy Kim:
We don’t store or host anything. Yeah. Got it. And actually you would just type in Go slash Einar file and that would be it. You don’t even have to do the TinySeed portion.  

Rob Walling:
Yeah. Oh, go. So it doesn’t need to be a TLD. It’s literally because the Chrome browser is  

Andy Kim:
Correct.  

Rob Walling:
The Chrome plugin, I’m sorry, is going Ah, go slash a R’s important resource.  

Andy Kim:
Yeah.  

Rob Walling:
So is this a real problem? Who’s paying for this? I guess it’s like who uses this? Someone invented this and it’s somehow popular. What’s the story?  

Andy Kim:
Yeah, this was started back in the early to mid two thousands at Google. We actually have a very cool interview with a couple of the people that started this at Google on our website. You can check that out. But basically folks at Google were asking to set up these redirects. So they would say, Hey, I have a holiday party. I’m planning for all of Google. It’s really hard to communicate this to 10, 20, 50,000 people and it’s going to be go slash holiday party 2007 for example. And they communicate that to Google, and these engineers were setting up these redirects internally for Google and they thought, let’s set up a service for this so that anyone can just self-serve themselves. And what ended up happening was as this just exploded in popularity at Google, folks left Google, they would go to LinkedIn or Netflix or any other large tech company and they would set the service up for themselves. And that’s really what happened with John, my co-founder as well. He worked at Google, went to a startup, wanted go links, set it up for them, other folks kept on coming back to him and asking him to set it up for their startup. And he’s like, bang idea. Let’s make this a service.  

Rob Walling:
Got it. So then this is independent. The concept of Go Links has been built by hand inside Google and other Silicon Valley startups, and then Rado is a self-serve version of not Not right, but it’s a SaaS version of the same thing that John kind of obfuscated out. It’s such a trip, it sounds like still to this day, I am like, don’t know. I don’t feel like I need this myself. I don’t feel like I need this, but it’s obvious you have clients like what Figma? I mean you have big enterprise, any other notables,  

Andy Kim:
A couple of Fortune 500 companies for sure.  

Rob Walling:
So it’s for them to pay for it and your pricing’s on your website, it’s a $3 per user. Got it. I can just extrapolate to, these are not small contracts, these are enterprise size contracts, so it’s obviously for there to be enterprise contracts around this is something that if you haven’t used it, it doesn’t feel like a pain point, but when you use it and get kind of addicted to it or get used to it perhaps that the next company go to, you’re like, I got to have this. Is that really what?  

Andy Kim:
Definitely.  

Rob Walling:
Okay.  

Andy Kim:
That’s definitely it. I mean, we can see it in our user base. So there’s, depending on the company, there are 20 to 30% of users that use this more than five times a day. Anything that they’re going to, they’re using a goal link to get there. There are others that may be more like you who only use it once a month if that, and it’s because I as a power user sent you a link. But what we find is that the adoption rate of this within a company doesn’t stop at 20 or 30%. It’s like 70% average usage per month for all of the employees at a particular company. Once they’ve fully adopted this, it’s a daily weekly tool that folks use regularly. It just becomes part of your normal workflow. You don’t look to bookmark things, you just know that a Go link exists. So think of it as a bookmark placer, think of it as a memory helper, all of that.  

Rob Walling:
Interesting. Before we get further, I want to dig into the story of rado and how you’ve been growing it, but can you give us an idea of where the business stands today?  

Andy Kim:
Yeah, we’re profitable, which is great. We’re six figures in revenue. The story generally is John built an awesome product. It stands up on its own. We have SOC two, type two, we have a bunch of different services including SSO. We have a Slack app. So all of the pieces are there that John built, but he was a classic founder who focused more on the product itself rather than a little bit more on the sales and marketing piece of it. And that’s kind of where I come into the picture and that’s kind of where we are today, which is you’ll talk about probably some of the issues that we may have, but that’s the problem we’re trying to solve for is how do we get awareness out there about what Go Links are and also why Trato is the best option for someone who is looking for Go Links. And that’s really the crux of where we are today.  

Rob Walling:
That is, that’s the next thing I want to talk about is you have, I talk about on this podcast, five stages of awareness from Eugene Schwartz and its unaware, problem aware, solution aware, product aware, and most aware in that order. For most people, they’re just unaware, like I was unaware of this before you interviewed a TinySeed. But then there is a different subset that is problem aware, and the problem that they have is, I used Go Links at insert name of startups, I’m at the new place of employment, and my problem is I really want those, right? But they probably aren’t aware that there is a solution to this, and I imagine they think I need to get engineering to build it. We had a custom one at the other thing and the IT department or whatever maintained it. So how do, as a founder who’s trying to grow this business deal with that of, Hey, because in a perfect world, you’re at stage one and two, you want to be at four and five, you want to be at product, everyone’s product aware, Hubspotter, Salesforce or Shopify or everybody’s most aware, whatever, it never happens, but you’re all the way at the other end, so it feels like a headwind. 

How do you think about that as a founder?  

Andy Kim:
Yeah, I think if we were trying to get every company in the world to adopt Go Links, that would feel like an impossible task. Just boiling the ocean. You’re never going to be able to get the attention span of everyone out there to be able to do that. So that’s not something that we really think about. We’re trying to solve for, Hey, folks that have already used Go Links say, and you can pull folks that used to work at the Googles and Netflix is the big tech companies of the world, and oh, they work at a new company now, and that becomes our ideal customer profile. These people probably have used Gox before, and in the best case scenario, they’ve loved Gox. I’ll give you one example. We reached out to the CTO of a very large tech company, a Fortune 500 company, and they didn’t have Go Links and responded immediately to a very cold email outreach and they have I think north of 10,000 employees, and it was an instant conversation. He was selling Go links to the other people on his team on that call. It was great. Now we have to go and close that deal, and there’s other considerations like budget and timing and all of this, but that’s the kind of power of, Hey, if you’ve used Go Links before and it was part of your workflow, this is an easier sell than most. But the problem is if you haven’t used Go Links, then you fall into Rob Wallings world where you’re like, why the heck would anyone buy this thing?  

Rob Walling:
A real customer education challenge, right? In that because you’re not inventing a new category, the category exists, but it’s not a big category yet. It’s not DocuSign like electronic signature or scheduling links or marketing automation or something where it’s this massive thing with dozens of competitors, if not hundreds. It’s this, and this is a conversation, and I’ve had when you interviewed for TinySeed was like, how big can this get? How many pasta? I mean, I guess over the course of 20 years, as people move to a new job and moved a new job, it’ll eventually propagate. But today, how do you think about that as a mostly bootstrap startup? I’m presuming since you’re in TinySeed that you want to get two, seven or eight figures in a RR. Yeah. And how do you think about that?  

Andy Kim:
Yeah, I think what’s exciting for us is that what we’re seeing is true. Our target market continues to be technology companies, but there are non-technology companies, say in automotive, industrial healthcare government, and that is wide open greenfield opportunity for us. And they are, I would say, in a sense, starved of productivity tools like Go Links that technology companies use every day and take for granted DocuSign. CRMs are just one classic example of that, but there’s so many other niche kind of productivity tools that if you work at a tech company, you’re like, oh yeah, of course this works. Of course this works. And that kind of migration from technology companies to non-tech seeing that live in our pipeline, and that’s what I’m most excited about because you’re right, it’d be one thing if it was kind of slowly moving across tech companies. That’d be a slow growing market, but because we have non-tech companies adopting this as well, that’s kind of what I’m most excited about. For example, we have a nonprofit customer who said, truly when new employees join and they use Go Links, and they were working at other nonprofit before, it is just magic. It just works. And that’s kind of the magic that we’re trying to achieve. Not just that tech companies, but non-tech companies.  

Rob Walling:
There are actually quite a few products and TinySeed that are hard to get the deal signed, but the retention is through the roof. It’s like there’s net negative churn, frankly. And it feels like Rado is that kind of product. Would you that? Yeah,  

Andy Kim:
I would agree. I mean, we have customers who have been with us for four or five years now, and the companies are growing, which is great for us. Again, we charge per seat, but we see the, hey, new people join the company. They start using Go Links, and it just expands the overall pie for us. And that’s exciting for us, and that’s what we’re really trying to achieve.  

Rob Walling:
And so I’d imagine that your marketing or slash go to market motion has to all be outbound because I can’t imagine there’s much search volume or even much conversation in Facebook groups or Quora or Reddit, all the marketing. I have 20 B2B marketing approaches in SaaS Playbook, and I’m guessing 19 of them don’t work. I mean, I’m sure in person event there’s some things that could work, but it seems like you would have to be going out there finding people.  

Andy Kim:
Yeah, that’s what we’re really trying to solve for is what is the repeatable marketing funnel that works for us? We’ve tried outbound email, we’ve tried Google AdWords, of course, we’ve tried all the different kind of playbook items, and we’re still really searching for what is the best solution that says, I can put in X amount of effort and time and money resulting in why leads that part of the funnel we have not yet solved for yet. And that’s part of the journey that we’re on.  

Rob Walling:
Yeah, that’s the stage of a lot of most listeners to this show are in that stage of trying to figure out what’s the repeatable thing that I can scale up. I remember it was interesting in some of my earlier software slash SaaS companies, I found one or two channels that I could really crank up and really get a lot of volume out of. When I launched Drip, I remember being like, yeah, I’ve got to find that one or two thing, one or two. And it never happened. It was just a bunch of things. I don’t think there was a single kind of traffic source, so to speak, that was more than 15% of our monthly trials. So we had, oh, 

Yeah. And it was all time I was running, I was dealing with Facebook ads. I was paying somebody to run those. We were doing SEO, I was doing podcast tours, we were had an affiliate program. There was all kinds of stuff. And it was just all that’s great for kind of diversification so that no single source can crush you. It also kind of sucks because I had to manage all of that, and we were, at the time, we were a four person team, five person team. And by the end, by time we sold, we were 10, but oh, we were doing cold outbound as well. I mean, we were doing all of it, and it was all kind of working. It was all working well enough, and as a big, it got the snowball going, and the growth was really good. I mean, that’s one of the reasons we got acquired was we were picking up market share so fast, but I found it frustrating to be on this small team and be like, I don’t want to manage all this crap. I needed a marketing team of six or eight people probably, and it was me, halftime, and a full-time junior marketer, and then our customer success person halftime. And it was always frustrating. It is not a myth to be like, Ooh, you’re going to find one or two things that work, but it’s really hard. It takes a lot. It doesn’t just take a lot of trial and error. It just doesn’t work in all spaces or with all categories where you’re just going to find that single silver bullet, so to speak.  

Andy Kim:
Yeah, I agree. This is actually a common topic for our TinySeed Masterminds group actually of, okay, we have a product that we think is working now, how do we reach the right people at the right time? And I think that’s actually some of the value in the community as well, right? Because I mean, I just use the Slack channel all the time to ping people and be like, Hey, we’re thinking about trying this. We are doing this. And just people that have been on that journey before is just super helpful to get all of their thoughts.  

Rob Walling:
Yeah, it’s definitely helpful to learn from those who came before you. That’s whether, if you’re in TinySeed how to do that. If you’re in the MicroComp orbit that’s MicroComp Connect, or even listening to this podcast and hearing the experience of folks and reading the books and all that, hiring senior developers can really move the needle in your business. But if you bring on the wrong person, you can quickly burn through your runway. If you need help finding a vetted senior results oriented developer, you should reach out to today’s sponsor lemon.io. For years, they’ve been helping our audience find high quality global talent at competitive rates. And they can help you too. Don’t just take my word for it, listener. Dylan Pierce had this to say about working with lemon.io. The machine learning engineer, they helped me hire was very professional and even learned a new tech stack to set up an environment to train and deploy machine learning models. He documented his work clearly so I could train it in the future with additional data. I’m super happy with the results. And longtime listener, Chaz Yun hired a senior developer from lemon.io and said his hire quote, definitely knew his stuff, provided appropriate feedback and pushback and had great communication, including very fluent English. He really exceeded my expectations. Chaz said he definitely used lemon.io again when he’s looking for a senior level engineer to learn more and get a 15% discount on your first four weeks of working with a developer head to lemon.io/startups. That’s lemon.io/startups. 

So I want to switch it up a little bit and ask you about the, I’d say the unorthodox way that you came about being a co-founder of this company. So your co-founder John built it and got a first big customer in 2020, and then you came in, it was either 2023 or 2024 last year, and you bought into the business and he’s now a minority owner. TinySeed obviously owns our percentage, but tell us a little bit about how that went down and who came up with the idea. Again, it’s unorthodox, and I like to tell stories on this show to give people an idea of, oh, that’s possible. I didn’t know you could do that. Right? And then when I heard your story, I was like, huh. Yeah, it’s an interesting way. So walk us through what happened.  

Andy Kim:
Yeah. So I have been interested in my own startup for the longest time. I can’t even begin to tell you how long it’s been. And part of the problem was how do I stand something up? How do I get the first customer? How do I get the first product out the door? How do I get first interest? And that to me was a big enough barrier that it felt like diving off the deep end. What ended up happening was I’ve been looking for businesses to buy on various marketplaces, and one that came across for me on Quiet Light was John’s business, this Rado business. And John’s part of the story is really, he built this thing to be sustainable, but he has a full-time job as a software engineer, and this business just wasn’t getting enough care and attention that it needed. And admittedly, he probably stubbed his toe with other partners in the past, but with me buying in, it’s a real capital commitment to growing this thing. 

And I think at the end of the day, what mattered the most and continues to matter the most to us is the level of trust that John and I have built over the last year plus of, Hey, John, I’m taking care of his baby, basically his company, and taking it forward. And he’s there as support on critical issues that he has the experience and knowledge about, and it’s actually worked out better than I could have really imagined for I think both of our cases. And it’s something that I’m super happy about and excited that it’s kind of turned out the way that it has.  

Rob Walling:
Did you and John know each other before this?  

Andy Kim:
No, we did not.  

Rob Walling:
Okay. How did you find each other?  

Andy Kim:
Through Quiet Light, the broker?  

Rob Walling:
Ah, very nice. I didn’t know that Quiet light would do majority, but not full acquisitions.  

Andy Kim:
Yeah, I think at the time I also wanted to acquire the full business, but in conversations as John and I built trust, I think John wanted to retain a certain percentage, and in retrospect, it was probably the right outcome for both of us to make sure that our incentives were aligned. So he’s still involved  

Rob Walling:
With the business.  

Andy Kim:
I mean, we used to catch up every week. It then turned into every two weeks. Now it’s on a monthly basis. But yeah, I ping him all the time on Slack and bother him with questions, and yeah, it’s been  

Rob Walling:
Great. As we move towards wrapping up, I have question for you that I like to ask of a lot of guests that come on the show, and it’s, in your experience running, growing, building this business, what has been the hardest thing about it? And you can either say overall like, Ooh, it’s been X, Y, Z challenge. Or if there’s a moment where you were like, this is so I’m not having fun at all. You can also just go to a moment.  

Andy Kim:
I don’t have a moment, but it is the general feeling of not knowing what the right answers are. You go to school and you’re like, okay, I got an A or B on that test. You go to work and you’re like, okay, I know I’m doing well or I’m not doing well. You know what the company’s doing, but you’re a smaller part of it when you’re at the size of company that we are. And it seems like at times we’re flailing in a large ocean of everything else that’s going on. The real question is how do you know what your North Star is? How do you know that you’re making progress against that, and how do you try to figure out the basic problems of going from basically nothing to a company with processes and with people and with all of that? So I think the general frustration of the question is all of the effort that we’re putting together on this thing worth what we think it’s going to be worth, that’s the real crux of the problem. And again, on the marketing side, you can truly spend unlimited amounts of money into all of the various methodologies and end up with nothing. This is not a game where you are guaranteed results, and I think that general kind of frustration is the toughest part of this entire journey.  

Rob Walling:
The uncertainty, yeah. It’s not just the money, it’s your opportunity cost, man. You could get a job working for a company in the Bay Area and make lots of money, and yet you are basically, I’m guessing, taking a below market salary as most of us do, and just trying to figure it out. And that is a real, it’s a gamble, kind of the traditional, maybe Silicon Valley or YC founder is like a 23-year-old founder doing it or having a this and that, and there’s a reason for that stereotype. Most of the MicroConf, TinySeed startups of the rest of his ecosystem tends to skew a little older, let’s say thirties and forties, some folks in their fifties. But the further you get on and the more you’re making three 50 grand a year as an engineer, senior engineer for Facebook or something, it becomes really hard to leave that for the uncertainty of a startup. And I think it is. I mean, it’s just one of the big concerns that folks have.  

Andy Kim:
Definitely the uncertainty though also makes it a little bit more fun when things do go your way and you do figure it out. And truly, I think that we would have some difficulty if it wasn’t for the TinySeed community, just like being able to call you or call a and r or the mastermind group that we have. It’s just super helpful to be like, okay, I’m not in this alone, and here’s how we’re all going to get through it together.  

Rob Walling:
Being alone in the uncertainty is even harder and being alone and having a spouse or a family in the uncertainty, and it’s like, well, I’m going to spend all these nights and weekends for at least you’re able to do it full time, hopefully mostly during the day. But the boots, I bootstrapped five companies and then raise money for TinySeed, but four of them, I did effectively nights and weekends, and it was not fun. I had young kids and I was telling Sherry, my wife, so all this time I’m putting into this thing. By the time I was on the second one, the first one had made enough money that it was like, okay, I’m going to do this again. And I kind of know what I’m doing now and now Fred. But the first one was a real tough sell. When our friends were like, let’s go to happy hour. 

And I’m like, I would love to. Or I’d go and I’d leave early. I was like, dude, I got to get home and write some code on this thing. These are the trade-offs, the unseen, unseen trade-offs of entrepreneurship, but specifically bootstrapping of any kind is just a lot of grinding hours. So Andy Kim, thanks so much for joining me on the show. If folks want to keep up with you on X Twitter, you are at rado hq. And of course, if folks want to check out Trot, thanks again. Thanks again to Andy for coming on the show, and thank you for listening this week and every week. This is Rob Walling signing off from episode 739.