050 Dave Will - PropFuel

For this fifty-third episode, I talked to Matthew Cleevely, Co-Founder of 10to8, a scheduling platform that is built for less digital environments, like the dentist or the national health service. When Matthew was doing his PhD in entrepreneurship, he and his co-founder talked with a dentist friend of theirs who wanted to digitize his business. They dug in, analyzed how his dental practice worked, and found out that he had a large no-show rate because scheduling was a pain. That’s when 10to8 was born. We talk about building water rockets and designing mouse mats, picking things apart to learn how to build things, the stress of running out of money, and how to make yearly plans you’ll actually realize.

For this fifty-second episode, I talked to Susanne Klepsch, Co-Founder of MeetFox, a platform for coaches, lawyers and other independent service professionals to schedule, meet and charge in one seamless flow. After brief stints in the tourism and automotive industry, Susanne took on sales at her father’s plastics companies after he passed away. After assuming a leadership position in which she was suddenly responsible for 120 employees, she went looking for a coach. That process took so long and was so intransparent that she decided to launch CoachFox, an online marketplace for coaching services. She spent a lot of time developing the technology behind that marketplace, creating a seamless coaching experience. And then she spun out that product into a separate company, which is called MeetFox today. That’s the very short story at least. We talk about how we got to love processes, why as a small business you should do things that don’t scale to compete, how difficult it is to convert freemium users, and why Susanne wishes she stuck with a niche much earlier.

For this fifty-first episode, I talked to Ai Ching Goh, Co-Founder of Piktochart, a software to build beautiful infographics and videos, with the goal of becoming a “business storytelling platform”. After Ai Ching had a burn-out working at P&G, she decided to start her own company together with her husband, at the time a web design agency, with the purpose of eliminating her Monday blues. This is where her journey began to build a company where people come first. One day, about 10 years ago, dreaming about the power of visual storytelling, she started working on Piktochart, software that allows you to easily create infographics. Today, she’s still working on Piktochart and Ai Ching and her team are in it for the long haul, building a sustainable company that constantly takes daring steps to improve the quality of life of everyone involved. We talk about why and how Piktochart introduced a 4-day workweek, how it feels to be working fully remotely from a tropical island, what it means to build a people centric company, and the immense power of deep work.

For this fiftieth episode, I talked to Dave Will, Co-Founder of PropFuel, a platform that helps associations better engage with their members. Dave started off his career in the corporate world, working at PwC on systems integration of big corporate systems like Siebel and SAP. The moments that changed everything for him were when his boss told him to walk faster and smile less when moving through the hallways… and when he got fired for lacking a sense of urgency. That’s when he decided he didn’t want to work for other people, and he started a small reseller business. From there, he rolled from the one thing in the other. Today he’s focusing on building out PropFuel, pushing boundaries one step at a time while enjoying the journey. We talk about walking slow and smiling more, focusing on controlled growth instead of building a high risk high growth business, why we don’t like the sitcom Silicon Valley, and the importance of the little things.

For this forty-ninth episode, I talked to Lisa Popovici, Co-Founder of Cartloop, an SMS marketing service that offers you a team that helps customers with their abandoned shopping carts on your Shopify store. Lisa went to med school. While doing that, she wanted to earn her own money, and started a women’s fashion brand. She came home from classes every day, excited to work on her business, and found out she was more passionate about e-commerce than her studies. After getting her degree, she decided to focus herself full time on her passion. And then she wanted to do something even bigger: really solving a problem. The problem was right in front of her: abandoned shopping carts. We talk about why she chose entrepreneurship over med school, what motivates and what scares her, everything she does to stay healthy and balanced, how you make your customers the heroes, and why it’s important to build habits and set priorities.

For this forty-eighth episode, I talked to Udesh Jadnanansing, Co-Founder of Mopinion, an all-in-one user feedback platform for high traffic websites. Mopinion started when Udesh and his co-founders had a digital agency that developed websites and apps. One thing they noticed was that getting qualitative information about the user’s perspective beyond quantitative analytics was hard. And their customers were wrestling with it. That’s when they knew they had to develop a solution for this problem. Before Mopinion, Udesh started a t-shirt printing business. He had the idea for a t-shirt for young kids that was extremely customizable by using velcro stickers. The business ultimately failed because of issues with a supplier, resulting in a large amount of unusable stock. That’s when Udesh learned his first lessons as an entrepreneur, temporarily set his dreams aside to join the digital agency world, only to be back years later with his own digital agency and finally with Mopinion. We talk about why Mopinion focuses on the European market, how as a CRO he spends his time crunching data, the ethics of habit building in software, and why you should start selling your product as soon as possible. Welcome to Founder Coffee.

For this forty-seventh episode, I talked to Will van der Sanden, Founder and CEO of Dux-Soup, one of the leading LinkedIn automation tools in the market. Dux-Soup started when Will wanted to help his wife with reaching out to prospects for her business. As a developer, he built tools to scrape different sites, like Yahoo, the Yellow Pages and LinkedIn. When he showed his software to other people, he got quite some interest going for the LinkedIn scraping, so he decided to specialize on this. Despite the uncertainty of building a tool on top of another platform, especially unofficially, Dux-Soup has now been around for five years and has gathered over 60.000 users on its software. We talk about how to build a remote team, why Dux-Soup mostly employs freelancers, why they price their product lower than competitors, how Chrome sets the internet standards, and why listening is a founder’s most important skill.

For this forty-sixth episode, I talked to Steven Benson, Founder and CEO of Badger Maps, a leading mapping platform and route planning app for field sales people. After studying geography and doing an MBA, Steven spent his whole career in field sales at companies like IBM and HP and then went on to sell the Google Maps API to businesses. Being exposed to a lot of mapping problems, he figured there was a space in the market for a mapping product for field sales people. That's when Badger Maps was born. Almost 9 years later, Steven now leads a bootstrapped business with a team of 75 people. We talk about the power of podcasting, studying languages, doing three-hour bike rides on a stationary bike, and why he might move his company out of the Valley.

For this forty-fifth episode, I talked to Nick Franklin, Founder and CEO of ChartMogul, one of the leading platforms to track and analyze subscription metrics for SaaS and mobile subscription companies. Previous to ChartMogul, Nick worked at Zendesk and he started up its EMEA and then Asian operations as a general manager. He experienced firsthand how difficult it was to track and analyze their metrics and he built up a system for it internally. It wasn’t user friendly however, nor did it answer all his questions quickly. So after 5 years at Zendesk, he went out on his own and started ChartMogul. We talk about the joys of building stuff and hiring the right people, how he’s looking to go deeper in the current niche, his plans with implementing EOS, living in Korea, and developing your own inner confidence.

For this forty-fourth episode, I talked to Amir Salihefendić, Founder and CEO of Doist, the company behind the leading to-do app Todoist and the asynchronous team communication platform Twist. Amir started working on Todoist in 2007 while he was a student, got some immediate coverage and a good amount of users, but then worked on other things for a while. He was the CTO of a social media company called Plurk and then tried building a project management system called Wedoist. Then in 2011, he decided to focus back on Todoist, which had hundreds of thousands of users by then and he’s been focused on growing it for the long term ever since. We talk about the advantages of building products for yourself, how synchronous team communication is stressing us all out, the difficulties of finding product-market fit in a busy industry, and how to stay competitive in the long run.