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Tales from the PROS is hosted by Michael Georgiou, Co-Founder, and Eric Lawrence, Director of Growth at Imaginovation, an award-winning app and software development company. Each episode dives into honest, unscripted conversations, hard-earned lessons, and the behind-the-scenes chaos of life inside a tech agency.
If you’re a founder, exec, or innovator trying to navigate the tech world without getting burned, this podcast is your no-BS roadmap. Through real talk, personal stories, and insights from the front lines, you’ll pick up smarter ways to build software, steer clear of common mistakes, and choose the right partners in a crowded, often confusing space.
Whether you’re scaling a startup, driving digital change at a larger company, or just love keeping up with tech innovation, Tales from the PROS brings you straight-shooting advice and inspiration without the fluff.
Michael Georgiou (00:43)
Hey everyone, welcome back to Tales from the Pros. I'm Michael Georgiou joined by my co-host Eric Lawrence from Imaginovation Today we're tackling something we've seen up close over and over again, the silent killers of SaaS startups. Not the usual culprits like funding or tech stack, but the bigger picture. Poor planning, unclear direction, broken leadership and missed market signals. We've worked with a wide range of startup founders
some who have succeeded and scaled and others who have burned out before reaching product market fit. So today we're digging into those lessons, not from theory, but from experience. Welcome everyone. Thank you so much for listening to us today and we really appreciate it and we're excited to get into it today. Eric, how you doing man?
Eric Lawrence (01:32)
Doing great, doing great, ready for the Fourth of July weekend.
Michael Georgiou (01:35)
Yeah, man. Any plans?
Eric Lawrence (01:37)
I think we're just gonna grill out. Nothing crazy.
Michael Georgiou (01:40)
Cool. Yeah, I think same with us. I think we're just gonna kind of grill out, kind of take it easy, you know, maybe make some margaritas or something like that. We'll see. Yeah. Yeah.
Eric Lawrence (01:49)
Yeah, yeah, that's never a bad idea, but yeah,
excited to talk about this today.
Michael Georgiou (01:54)
Yeah, man. Yeah, it's good. When we were kind of just being, I want to say, kind of just being transparent, when you and I prep for these episodes, we always think about what can others find value from, right? Especially startups right now is ⁓ hugely in demand, especially with AI. We're seeing a lot of startups, especially lately. I know we've seen startups before as well, but...
kind of seen a big uptick the past year or so, which is awesome to see, right? However, there's a lot of things that go into just the startup world, whether they're trying to create something from scratch or they're creating a physical product where they wanna integrate with a piece of software and hire a team like us to build it for them, whatever it might be.
There's all sorts of different startups, right? But we've seen some that have succeeded and some that have failed. So today we just really want to kind of dive a little deep and talk to everyone today and give as much guidance as we can and experiences and stories. So we're ready to get into this. So yeah.
Eric Lawrence (03:05)
Yeah. And I know Michael, from
your standpoint, you've, you've been a part of this world since starting the company back in 2011. So it's what coming up on 15 years almost. And at least from my perspective, I've been with this organization for a little over three years, being on the front lines. So I've actually, I've had the pleasure of speaking with a lot of different business owners, a lot of different startups and people that have ideas. So I think, yeah, for us to talk about what are some of the
Michael Georgiou (03:11)
Yeah, long time.
Eric Lawrence (03:33)
mistakes that they run into and things to consider. And this is, this is just consistent feedback that we've gathered, that we've noticed out of startups that have an idea that want to build maybe a SaaS platform, maybe, you know, some sort of application or software, like what, are those things that they run into that they struggle with? And I think if we can share that with the people out there, maybe they can think about their own position and say, Hey,
Is my thinking along these lines? Am I making these mistakes? Because at the end of the day, we all want the same thing, which is for, for, you know, our venture to be successful.
Michael Georgiou (04:11)
100%. Yeah. you know, just as a starting point, you know, when we've seen, when we've initially worked with startups, different types of startups, and, you know, we initially meet the founders typically, right? It's not usually like they have directors at that time. I mean, sometimes, but when it's like a ⁓ kind of a, just a business starting from scratch, from nothing, right? Bootstrapped, or they might have some funding.
You know, we typically will talk with the founders, which is cool. So like they're the ultimate decision-makers. So you really get a understanding of their ethos, their credo, how they want things to run in their business and things like that. So the perspectives we have are pretty amazing. And to start out, know, we've seen founders that treat an app that they want a tech partner to build kind of like, you know,
They want the app to almost be one and done. And I think that goes back to some of the mindset in some of the previous episodes we've talked about, not just with startups, but with everybody. You need to have the right mindset and the expectations when going into creating your own startup and you want to build an app. And I think it's having that mentality knowing that it's not just about building something that's going to be one and done.
go into it with the expectation knowing that, hey, I want to keep innovating on this thing for years to come. It's going to continuously be improved upon. It's going to have failures. It's going to have successes within the app. There's going to be tweaks. There's going to be changes. It's just part of the process. And it's all about how they manage those expectations, at least in the way beginning, to make sure that they set themselves up, their foundation, to be successful.
Eric Lawrence (06:00)
Yeah, it's funny how they think like that, right? It's so much of a mindset of this is what I want my app to be that it's almost tough to visualize past that to really start to think like, no, this is just gonna be the first iteration. What you think this app is going to be may be totally different two years, three years, because you gotta give it up to the market. You gotta give it up to the users. They may dictate something completely different from what your initial vision is.
Michael Georgiou (06:20)
Yeah.
Very true.
Yeah, it's not just about what you want, right? As a founder or whoever you're partnered up with your startup, right? It's about doing the initial planning research, doing some kind of, we call it like pre-buzz testing, like just kind of testing initially to see, you know, if the concept is going to be adopted in the market. So before you go in and spend all this money and time,
and trying to build a product, you got to make sure or do your best to make sure, there's no guarantees. Obviously just do your best to make sure, set yourself up for success, to test out different audiences in the way beginning, even before it's built on the concept of it and what your vision is. And that's very, very important. And also just coming up with a plan, an actual business plan and a model that will allow you and your team or your partner
to stay accountable, right? And manifesting that plan into reality will come a bit later, but that's really where it starts. And my experience, Eric, I've seen even just some friends of mine, that have started something, have started a business and they either they wanted to build a website or some sort of mobile or web app or whatever it is, some technology that goes with their business. They don't...
do the, they don't do any sort of planning in the beginning. And I'm not talking about the product plan, right? That is important, yes, but I'm talking about the actual business plan. That's very, very important. And the product is part of that, if that suits your business, right? If that's a part of your business. So it's really coming prepared with the right business model, the plan, documenting it, having that strategy, and you know, maybe,
trying to find out like what your team is gonna look like in terms of who you're gonna be hiring with developers or it could be with a CTO. You know, we've seen that before. A lot of them wanna hire this kind of chief technical officer or kind of a chief operating officer or things like that. So it's important to come with a plan, but you also don't wanna over plan either. Cause you can over plan and then you end up never getting started. So I always say it's really having this balance of
creating a plan of action that includes your product, you want to build, having your vision for that, but it's also having the business model that you want to execute and implement.
Eric Lawrence (09:00)
Well said. would say that imbalance is probably what I run into the most, which is somebody's thought so much about what they want their product to be that they totally overlook the business plan of it. And I, I almost, call it the, the field of dreams fallacy, which is the mindset of, well, all that matters is the product because if I build it, they will come. And the challenge is
Michael Georgiou (09:08)
Yeah.
Hmm.
Eric Lawrence (09:24)
When you build an app and you launch it, you may not be the only one in the marketplace. And that's, that's not a big deal because there's always going to be space for market share, whatever it is that you're building, as long as there's demand for it. but the problem is like when you launch an app, who knows about it, you could be buried in page five of the app store listings and nobody knows about it. So it's so important to have a business plan, not just like a business and a marketing plan, but
Michael Georgiou (09:24)
I like that.
100%.
Eric Lawrence (09:51)
to have at least thought about the numbers behind your monetization plan of how many users will I need? What sort of subscription or however you plan to monetize the app? What's gonna be that break even line for me so that you go into it with a plan of knowing what you need in order for this to be successful. So you're not just kind of like jumping in, throwing money at it, assuming it's gonna be a multi-million dollar success out the gate.
Michael Georgiou (09:57)
Hehe.
Eric Lawrence (10:18)
with no marketing plan.
Michael Georgiou (10:20)
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, and yeah, no, that's very well said. You can create something so unique and have this amazing idea that you think no one's ever heard of before or whatnot. But in my experience, man, I'll tell you, it's not just about having a unique idea. Having a unique idea is important, right? And having a plan around that idea, obviously, like we just mentioned a couple minutes ago, is critical.
to starting something, but it's also like, don't limit yourself with just trying to create something that's gonna be so unique that no one else has ever done it, because that can stop you from doing something amazing. I'll tell you, there's a lot of examples that I've seen, like, I mean, I'll name us, our company, even though we're more like a service-based business, but still.
There are so many competitors out there that do what we do. But because of how we've done it, the way we've built the business, the way we've persevered through all those setbacks, those challenges, those struggles, those obstacles that built our story to make us different, that made us kind of unique, knowing that we can go through all of that and still be here and still work with new clients and make an impact on the market and make an impact on people. And it goes the same way with
a ⁓ SaaS startup that's building a product, right? You don't have to be super, super unique. Being unique can be a game changer, absolutely, but I think it just depends on the circumstances and the context of what you're doing. You don't always have to be unique in what you're trying to do. And you can be another kind of pizza shop, so to speak, but you do it right and you do it well and you know how to handle it and you manage all those...
kind of good, bad and uglies that's gonna happen, that's gonna come to you. And that will really set you up for long-term success.
Eric Lawrence (12:17)
Yeah, a lot of it comes
down to the branding as well. Do you stand out in the marketplace? Cause there, there are some brands like you think about brands that, are basically the same Uber lift. They're able to get themselves to differentiate themselves just by how they brand themselves. ⁓ and there, there's also the one I'm, I'm blanking on the name of it. Like the, the water company that comes in cans that's targeted towards men. I think it's,
Michael Georgiou (12:33)
Yep.
Eric Lawrence (12:42)
It's on the tip of my tongue, but that's one of the ones where you think like, how can you brand water? But everything comes down to how you can brand something. And I think just on the topic of validation, I think sometimes people can get a little bit blinded by what's actually validation. And what I mean by that is if I speak with somebody and they say, I think this is a great idea because I've asked some friends and family,
Michael Georgiou (12:45)
Yeah, I know what you're talking about. There you go.
Mm-hmm.
Eric Lawrence (13:10)
what they think about this and they tell me it's a great idea. I think sometimes that can blind people where really the question that you need to be asking yourself, if you're still in that phase is, people willing to invest in it? Would people, would someone pay for this? Because what we tend to find with a lot of people that are starting up a business is that everybody will tell you it's great and we'll sit down and listen. But the moment that you ask for money, that's when things change.
Michael Georgiou (13:25)
yeah.
Eric Lawrence (13:36)
So I think if you're really looking for that validation, it honestly comes down to who's willing to put their dollar.
Michael Georgiou (13:44)
Yeah, yeah, no, no, for sure. Yeah, things can really change. Your perception can really change when you ask someone to cut a check. And that's kind of figuratively speaking, right? It's like, even if the platform that you're building, you want to charge, I don't know, five bucks a month or 10 bucks a month, whatever it might be, or even if it's thousands of dollars, you know, or hundreds of thousands, it doesn't matter, right? When you ask someone to pay for your software,
It can really shift your perspective and kind of give you a sense of reality, you know, because someone is taking their hard earned money. Like I said, whether it's $5 or 500, I mean, it can really just give you lot of insight into the marketplace. So yeah, I think understanding your market and doing that testing and also
You know, like you said, is like coming up with, what'd you say before? Like a couple minutes ago was actually really good, Eric. I'm trying to remember here. Kind of about like, let see, forgive me if I forgot. Yeah, like why someone would switch, like the differentiation, why someone would switch, right, from someone else's product to yours and pay for it. Why? You have to be able to answer that.
Eric Lawrence (14:56)
Yeah.
Michael Georgiou (15:06)
And show that into your plan and your execution and your product. Right. That's, that's what's going to make a huge difference.
Eric Lawrence (15:14)
Yeah. And the other thing that really makes an impact is with any startup and you can say this from experience, there's going to be challenges that come about. are going to be things that don't go your way. There might be hurdles that you hit. It could be something as simple as when you're building it, you decide you want to make a major change to your app and that's going to take time to shift or maybe your app's having trouble launching in the app store. It could be a number of things, but how do you handle?
Michael Georgiou (15:21)
Mm-hmm.
Well,
Mm-hmm.
Yeah.
Eric Lawrence (15:42)
because that's the big thing. There are definitely some clients that we work with that are startups that handle it gracefully and it's challenging for everybody involved, but you're able to continue to push forward and be smooth. Then there's definitely the clients that we've worked with on the flip side of it that, ⁓ it just breaks them mentally and it just emotionally too. And it just puts a strain on everybody involved.
Michael Georgiou (16:01)
Mm-hmm.
Emotionally.
Eric Lawrence (16:11)
And it makes the situation much, much worse. So I think every founder should sit down and have a serious conversation with themselves of anticipating, Hey, they're going to be challenges that I run into. How am I going to react to that? Because that in a lot of ways determines the success of your business, because look at any business out there. They'll run into challenges. Do they give up? Do they completely shift everything that they're doing? Do they panic or do they
take a good kind of look at what needs to be done, make a commitment and move forward without panicking.
Michael Georgiou (16:46)
Yeah, that's very well said. Challenges are inevitable. They're going to happen with whatever you're trying to build. And it's all about how you manage those challenges, how you react to them. We're human beings, right? Sometimes you will be emotional, but you got to make sure that you don't take down your team or yourself for that matter while you're trying to manage your emotions. Because this is your baby, right? This is something that you're building. is your...
You know, could be your everything, right? Your family depends on it. Your future depends on it. Your finances depend on it. There's a lot that goes into it. So it's really about how you manage and how you react to those situations with grace, with strategy, with improvements, which is what's going to lead you to progress forward. Cause like I said, going through struggles when you're building a startup, a SaaS product is inevitable.
So you have to expect that and stay patient during the process. I'm telling you everyone, I cannot express how important it is that it's not just the plan that you have or the unique idea that you have or even the team that you have, right? Or the demand that your product has to launch it and for you to make millions of dollars. None of that is possible, right? Without you having the right mindset, staying resilient.
persevering through all of the struggles, because you're going to go through a lot of them, and staying patient. Those are the ones that become successful.
Eric Lawrence (18:18)
Yeah. It's interesting to see for the people that run into like the problems and make a big deal out of it. It seems like they attract problems, right? It's, kind of like a self-fulfilling prophecy. If somebody has excuses. Yeah. When somebody has excuses, what you start to notice is there's an excuse every week, every single week. Same goes with problems too. So I feel like the mindset it attracts, if it's negative, it attracts negativity.
Michael Georgiou (18:29)
Hmm. Eric's going deep now. I like it. Good.
Yeah, man.
and
Yeah, no, it's so true. Yeah, no, I completely agree. Yeah, the mindset is critical and it goes back to kind of having that balance of having the right expectations, the mindset and just kind of your willingness, your dedication and focus, your patience. I know I'm throwing all these words, but it's all true in my opinion. That's what's really gonna kind of get you...
through the next stage, as long as you just kind of tell yourself that you're really willing to keep going, regardless of what happens, right? You're gonna keep going and you're gonna try to make this work. And a lot of times it just gets figured out if you're doing things right.
Eric Lawrence (19:25)
Yeah. ⁓
When you think about
like what, what stages are you potentially going to run into challenges? Of course, at the very beginning, when it comes to planning, when it comes to funding and getting your investment, there's always challenges you can run into when you're actually building the product. If you think about it, there could be challenges that you run into during the development phase, or especially as you're polishing it up, getting it ready for launch, there might be bugs that you run into. And then once it's been launched, if you think a little bit further down the road, that validation stage.
Michael Georgiou (19:40)
Mm-hmm.
Eric Lawrence (20:00)
And the first initial round of how you're marketing it, getting it out to the public. How does that go? Are you going to face challenges there? And then, you you can, you know, this one just as an organization, as you continue to grow and there's more overhead, how do you handle that? How are you kind of navigating the, ⁓ the step function of growth at each level that you go? and if there are any other things that come into the market, like competitors or
Michael Georgiou (20:17)
How you handle that?
Eric Lawrence (20:27)
new regulations that could make things difficult within your industry. There's just, there's always going to be something next.
Michael Georgiou (20:34)
No, that's a great point, man. What you touched on about, it's not only the product that you're building, that's basically your startup, kind of what we're talking about in this episode, in this context, it's also the, I think even more important is really the business that you're building around it. And that's where I've seen some big challenges.
with startups that didn't make it, unfortunately, is that they would have a good product, okay? But the business operational side of it, financial side of it, it wasn't aligned. It wasn't working like the product was, right? Because you can have this amazing product, but if you don't know how to market it, for example, that's a problem.
Okay, so you have to have the right marketing team. That goes back to your operations, because marketing is a part of your business plan, right? So you have to know how to market it. You have to have the right team in place for that. And then it's also how you're managing your finances. I won't get into that, but that's very, very important. And it's just kind of having the right team around you. These are just a couple of things that are operational, but yeah, making sure that you can handle and manage.
and keep improving the business side of the SaaS product that you're building and launching. And that's very, very critical. That's what's going to allow you to really scale, grow, become a, you know, or make an impact in the market and what you're trying to do.
Eric Lawrence (22:04)
That's where the hunger comes in. Because how many
times have we spoken with people where before the products launched, there's all this talk about how they're planning to get the word out there. And then once it's launched, it's like, you don't see the platform grow and it's crickets from somebody's end about what's being done to market it and to get it out there. Like what was once, ⁓ I'm going to share the word to everybody becomes silence. And then what ends up happening is,
Michael Georgiou (22:21)
I was gonna say crickets.
Yeah, man.
Eric Lawrence (22:34)
If you're not actively doing something and you can't communicate to the teams that you're working with, these are all the things that I'm doing right now to get the word out there, to market it, to promote it. And these are what's been working, what's not been working. And here's what we have planned ahead. Then your product's probably going to die. That's just the reality of it. You could think about our own company. We're not a product, so to speak, but we're always testing new ways.
Michael Georgiou (22:48)
Mm-hmm.
Eric Lawrence (23:01)
to be able to connect with people, educate them, to get out there. Because if we weren't doing that, nobody would ever know who we are. That's just the reality of it.
Michael Georgiou (23:01)
yeah.
Yeah, you gotta keep innovating as well and keep iterating on what you're doing, right? Because like you said, right, like, you can't have something that's gonna be stagnant. Even if you're not seeing a product market fit yet, you gotta figure out, well, why not? What's going on with my audience? Why are they not resonating with what I built?
maybe it's not making an impact on them somehow, you get that feedback, right? And then you iterate, you improve what you're currently doing with your business, and then also you're improving on the product. So you're continuously innovating the entire business model, and you're innovating the product itself, and that's that continuous kind of evolution of business in general. It's a foundational element to...
reaching some level of success, because success is all subjective to each and every one of us, right? So, now those are great points. Yeah.
Eric Lawrence (24:14)
That
actually leads. So we've, we've done a shout out to the sponsor of this podcast a few times, which is magic task. And for the people who aren't aware of what magic task is, we build products for 99 % of other people. we're building applications for other companies, but magic task is one just out of necessity of using other task management systems like JIRA and base camp.
Asana, monday.com. There are a lot of them out there. What we found for ourselves was that it was overly complex and it wasn't fun to use. Those are kind of the two key areas. And that's why we built magic task. It's, what we run all of our projects through. get our clients onboarded onto it. And when we get into the development process, it really breaks down everything that's in the backlog of a project really clearly who you can assign it to. It's gamified so that our engineers are
Michael Georgiou (24:41)
Mm-hmm.
Eric Lawrence (25:09)
you know, having fun and incentivize to use it. But what I wanted to touch on with Magic Task is your point exactly, Michael, which is we've gone through our own journey and our own discovery with Magic Task, where when we first released it, what we found was we went very heavy on the desktop version and we focused in on a lot of the gamification elements and a lot of the design elements. And I think we learned a few things by users and their feedback that
Michael Georgiou (25:36)
yeah.
Eric Lawrence (25:36)
What
they're looking for was a more optimized mobile experience because they want to be able to manage their task lists on the go. where for the first iteration of magic task, I feel we focused heavily on the desktop version. And so there are things that we've learned along the ways and we're actually about to work on a latest iteration of it that goes much, much deeper into the game element of it. Because initially with the first iteration of magic task,
Michael Georgiou (25:48)
Mm-hmm.
Eric Lawrence (26:03)
If you can think back to it, was more focused on leveling up your themes, whereas there was less of a game element where you are competing with other people and there's ⁓ characters that you can have and incentives that you get beyond just leveling up your themes. So that was the feedback that we got from the market and that's why we're working on the next iteration of it. But that's, that's just the journey that every company will go through as they create their own product.
Michael Georgiou (26:15)
Mm-hmm.
Yeah, that's a great example. I think that really is a great segue from what we were talking about before. just because we have a couple more minutes here, Eric,
being accountable within yourself as a startup founder to make sure that you're not overly reactive with not just your team, your partners, but even with yourself to make sure that you give yourself grace and your team grace for different challenges that are gonna be experienced. And it goes back to...
becoming a good leader, right? Because if you're going to build a SaaS product, you're going to be a leader if it succeeds. So you need to try to build those leadership skills by being accountable and disciplined yourself, but by also showing grace to yourself, to your team members, to your partners, because you're dealing with people.
And I say this because I hope it's not random. I'm just saying this because we've experienced sometimes some founders of startups that get so, so emotional during the process. And I get it. I trust me. completely get it. However, you know, sometimes that can really disrupt the growth of their product and of their businesses. And sometimes it can even make them fail. So leadership is the way you become a leader.
is going to be detrimental to your future.
leadership. It's very critical.
Eric Lawrence (28:07)
Absolutely. Now I'm
glad you touched on that because if you're a great leader and you can motivate your team and push the right buttons and do so respectfully, you can move mountains. You can accomplish so much. But if you belittle the teams that you're working with, if you're toxic, if you create a work environment that people do not enjoy being in, they're going to try to spend as little time being a part of that as possible, or it may affect their work.
Michael Georgiou (28:24)
Mm-hmm.
Eric Lawrence (28:37)
And that's to say everybody's accountable for delivering a great product. That's part of being on the team and working together. But at the end of the day, how you treat the teams around you makes a huge impact.
Michael Georgiou (28:49)
And it also allows your team to become or even stay motivated. And that's also very critical, right? You really want to be a leader of example to others, you know, if you're going to be building something like this. And that is, it's just so important, man. I can't reiterate that enough. It's just, yeah, being a leader, being a role ⁓ model to others. And that's all connected to everything that we do.
So, but yeah, no, I think that's it. That's all that we have for today. Everyone really appreciate your time and for listening to us today. And yeah, Eric, thank you, man. As always appreciate it. All right. Yeah. All right, everyone. Thank you so much. Again, my name is Michael Georgiou, your host from Tilson the Pros and my cohost, Eric Lawrence. We appreciate you guys. Thank you so much. Until next time. All right, everyone. All right, bye.
Eric Lawrence (29:27)
Absolutely, yeah, glad we got the chance to speak.
Take care, everyone.