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Interviews with world-class startup founders about their unique paths to uncover tactical insights they've learned about how to fundraise, grow, validate, hire, scale, and lead teams while building your startup.
Get full access to detailed takeaways on each episode, additional case studies, and more at join.foundingjourney.com
Not everyone needs to venture money.
Michael.Houck:That's Alexander Volodarsky. He's built a $16,000,000 business.
Alexander Volodarsky:Within 3 years, we grew 8 and a half times.
Michael.Houck:But when he started it, he sold 17% for just $60,000.
Alexander Volodarsky:I didn't understand the market.
Michael.Houck:And chased growth channels that didn't work out.
Alexander Volodarsky:A few $1,000,000 were wasted in this time. He told me how
Michael.Houck:he figured it out and built an 8 figure business and why and how he built an 80,000 person audience across
Michael Houck:x and LinkedIn, and how to build a big business in a crowded market.
Michael.Houck:This is Alexander Volodarsky's founding journey.
Michael Houck:Alright, Alexander. Great to have you, man. Thank you. Thank you. I feel like we've been talking for so long about content, growth, and and startups in general, and it's it's good to finally have you come on the pod.
Alexander Volodarsky:Yeah. Likewise. It's great to be here.
Michael Houck:So okay. Let's talk about Lemon and sort of how you got to Lemon because I think some founders say, we have to find some amazing idea, and then they just go all in on it. That that wasn't how it happened for you. You were like, I have an opportunity in front of me, and I'm just gonna go execute against it and take it and see where it goes.
Alexander Volodarsky:So LemonEye is a pivot from a different business that actually that previous business, or actually, like, fall in my lap, you could say. And, I I couldn't find a job, and I was going to this different conferences, and someone asked me if I can find them a developer. And I I I did know a developer. I who I worked with in the in my previous company. And I just helped them to work with this developer, and they were so amazed because they had experience in Upwork, and they're like, brought all their friends.
Alexander Volodarsky:So back then, that's grew into idea of a managed marketplace, of managed Upwork, was the same idea that people come with a small project and, and need some temporary work. But instead of just going on open market and, you know, going through all these developers, you just, we just assign someone who we know is great, who we know is available that can do this right away. Then after working, I think it grew, like, to $200,000 GMV. And, we kinda wanted to do to be in this business because it sounded really cool after story of Airbnb that, you know, there was a chaos in in short term rentals, and they put a order in short term rentals. I'm like, yeah, there's a chaos of of this of this freelance project.
Alexander Volodarsky:So let's put an order in it. And then going into it, it didn't look as sexy because, like there's a lot of, personal work and, and, the quality of those websites is pretty poor. And, like, if even if you do everything right, you broke this you break this, you know, all these plugins that they have on the on the websites. And there was a lot of operations, even even though the margins were pretty pretty high, I think it was like would go up to like 60% margins. You know, the the actual business was not a pleasant business, not enjoyable business.
Alexander Volodarsky:And, at the same point, I started doing some kind of marketing, and, the marketing worked, but not the clients that we're looking for. Different clients that were just, I don't care about the projects. I just need to add another developer to my team. And instead of, like, instead of, looking for for for a developer for 5, 10 hours of work, they were looking for, like, I don't know, 100 hours a a month or 160 hours a month. And it wasn't, you know, an eye opening for us.
Alexander Volodarsky:Not right away, by the way. At the beginning, we were like, no. We still wanna do that because it sounded really cool. If we can if we can do actually, put a, you know, evolution over here, it would be amazing. But then, you know, my cofounder is like, dude, you know, we get 90% of our revenue from the new type of clients that are you require almost no support.
Alexander Volodarsky:And, you know, yeah, it's much less, you know, markup, much less margin, but like, you know, yeah, we we grew over there pretty quickly. So, we then we pivoted to Lemon, you know, what is LemonEye today. And, from that, I think within, within 3 years, we grew, 8 and a half times x, not compared to, you know, what we did in the first, I think, 2 something years, we grew just only to 200,000 revenue. Jimmy. I think
Michael Houck:one of the interesting things is that you pivoted away from an idea that you thought, oh, this could be a revolutionary type idea. You pivoted into something that is you know, it's a crowded market. Right? There's, like, big player groups who've been in this space for a long time, and you've come and you've built a real large business on top of that. So how how did you know that it was the right call, and then how did you actually execute against that?
Alexander Volodarsky:No beautiful story on it. Just really we saw that this is growing much faster than, you know, something we would thought. And we were fighting it a little bit. Me and my father, by then, I lived in Ukraine, and we even went to San Francisco to discover ourselves. We didn't take any ASITs or something like that.
Alexander Volodarsky:But, yeah, we were trying to discover, you know, which which model is better, what type of clients is better. Basically, the answer was that you have to work on something, and if it doesn't work, just work with something else. So that's what we did. We worked on something that we wanted to work on, it didn't work as much, and then something that grew despite our focus on something else. So it was pretty obvious, to the yeah, market is very was, even back then, it was very crowded.
Alexander Volodarsky:Also, it's a commodity product, so it's really hard to differentiate over there. But despite all this, we were growing like crazy. So, you know, it was pretty obvious.
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Michael Houck:What do you think the the thing was that let you grow so quickly?
Alexander Volodarsky:So, yeah, the answer is pretty embarrassing, but we pivoted in 2020. It was COVID. And at the same time, the rates dropped. People started investing a lot in start and, over investing in startups, and there was so much money in the market. A lot of startups started.
Alexander Volodarsky:There's not a lot of not enough talent in the market. So we were just riding the wave, like, then pretty pretty high. And we, we created a pretty differentiator brand. I think it gave us some kind of differentiation in terms of like just remembering because we had like a very unique copy on the website and, our visual brand was pretty unique. So So we had, you know, people remember us more than, you know, any average company like that, but we didn't, we did have something that, I mean, we had a great talent on the on the platform, and despite like any, you know, many companies like that, we really know our talent, we are in close touch with them, we have a pretty rigorous vetting process, and we know, you know, every developer, their weaknesses, and, we know which developer would work on which pro would be better for which product, for each project.
Alexander Volodarsky:And, over there is our strengths. But, like, if, like, compared to Toptal, we're not that different. And, yeah, we would just back then, we were just driving the the wave.
Michael Houck:What would you say to a founder who's in a similar position and maybe is struggling to make that decision to go forward the business that's maybe growing faster, maybe isn't aligned to the vision that they originally had? Like, why do so many people get tripped up sort of waiting for that $1,000,000,000 moment when there might be a big business right in front of them?
Alexander Volodarsky:I don't think this is might be the right answer to every situation like this because if you look at the stories like Notion, right? Notion was grinding for many, many years before they grew, and now it's like a massive company. If they they would go into business that is, yeah, maybe would grow right away over there and then pivots to something that is short term, they would probably lose the, I don't know, I mean, it's a massive company and everyone uses it and love it. Right? There there are many, many stories like this.
Alexander Volodarsky:So I don't know if my story is applicable to something else. In in our case, we saw that it it was not as sexy as a product, and that we were trying to do the same as Airbnb did. We tried to put our systems and features to the things that were very unique. Like, for example, Airbnb did, how do you find the address? It was a big pain point, like when you just randomly ran on Craigslist, right?
Alexander Volodarsky:How do you find it? How do you manage the keys and stuff? They ultimately all these bits and bytes of the small problems. We tried to do this. It didn't work, as well, and people didn't comply with, with our features.
Alexander Volodarsky:Yeah. I don't think it's unique, so I don't wanna tell everyone, yeah, just just look at it, you know, maybe there are other opportunities. I think, you know, it's a bad advice to do that. But in our case, it worked well, and, you know, we we we, you know, we grew to to a distant size business. It's not a $1,000,000,000 idea.
Alexander Volodarsky:I imagine the biggest competitor, Toptal, is might be a $1,000,000,000 company already because they had, like, in the best year, they had, like, a sales, I think, like, 4 to 5 $500, probably,000,000 of revenue, something like that, around that. So they they might be a $1,000,000,000 company, but, like, the rest of
Michael Houck:the market, I don't think so. Let's about branding because I think you guys with Lemon have a very distinct brand identity. You kind of emphasize that on your own social media, and actually the process of going from Coding Ninjas to Lemon was this very intentional rebranding process. Maybe let's start there. You know, what went into that actual process of changing the brand, and why wasn't Coding Ninjas the right brand for for the new the new target?
Alexander Volodarsky:I mean, why Coding Ninjas is not the right brand? I think it's obvious. Like, the the ninja the ninja word became like a curse word, you know, like, something you avoid, like, you know, like people right now avoid, like, 30 under 30. If someone says I am a guru or an expert, I probably would avoid them. Ninja is the same thing.
Alexander Volodarsky:When I was I I came out with coding ninjas, I just had my first baby. It was like, 100 degrees outside, and I had the first client who wanted to pay me. And I I went just to to the I I lived in Israel back then, and I just went to, to local IRS to, to, you know, register the, the company, and like, I just needed the names. Well, like, coding ninjas, you know, like whatever, just get rid of it. But, yeah, then they were decided, oh, this company needs a brand to grow, And we, you know, we felt, yeah, we need to change.
Alexander Volodarsky:We need to change visually. We need to change how we communicate. So, we went into it. We were pretty open, open minded in terms of branding. And we partnered, we partnered with a few people who helped us to develop the, first of all, the brand persona, and they, help us to cut all the and all the marketing, way of thinking.
Alexander Volodarsky:Just go into think like what type of people are looking at us, and what type, and how, how would they see us, and they would, how do we want them to see us? And we just went and to describe this personas, our brand persona and our target persona would describe pretty, in a very, very little detail, including like what their name would be, you know, where they come from, who what their pet names, and like, we would just go in details, you know, what they listen to, how they spend their day. And we developed a pretty, pretty good picture, read about them and say like, oh, yeah, I can relate to that. And then we, and then we went and actually like stress test, not stress test, but like tested against real people, and it worked. And then we took, a team, our friends who has designed it to amazing, amazing designer team, they just took and said, oh, we have a vision for you.
Alexander Volodarsky:Like, I mean, in visual design, we have a vision for you. And they came up, and it was amazing. We, it really related because like we showed that, you know, this guy lives in Silicon Valley, and he's like very, very into this startup culture, which is actually a cult. And we, and, and, oh, yeah, it's a cult. Startup is a cult in many ways.
Alexander Volodarsky:And, YC speaks about this a lot. So, went into this, cult y theme. It's not as much right now. We decided to, to take a pause on it and, and, to to shift a little bit. But for for how many, 3 years already, it was a very, like, cult, like copy on the website, like, initiation, all these words, you know, that that, you know, very associated with the cult, and also the visual design was like that.
Alexander Volodarsky:And it gave us a pretty big boost at the beginning because people remember us, people, you know, related to the cult, but also I think they remember the branding, they really liked the copy, there were a lot of people would come to me a lot. It's just not, not 1, 2, 3 people, a lot. Like dozens of people will come to me and say, I'd actually spent time and went and read through your website because the copy was so good. We even have a tale of that is reflecting the story of our hero. It's on the website, by the way, it's amazing.
Alexander Volodarsky:Our, content writer, head of content, Dagdhan, she came up with that. So, we actually created a tale, actual tale with the drawings. It's pretty amazing, by the way, about our brand persona, and, it was amazing. Yeah. Yeah, I
Michael Houck:would definitely recommend folks to go check out the site. It's very unique, and, yeah, I think the, a lot of stuff to think, there are a lot of things on there that people can take, take away from it.
Alexander Volodarsky:By the way, it changed a lot. The website changed a lot. It's not as we went a little more pragmatic right now. We could just we changed the goals. By the way, the the thing that that we missed, we we realized pretty late and we should realize much earlier, that visual brand is like a teeny tiny part of the brand.
Alexander Volodarsky:And the copy, the the the the the tone of voice is a teeny tiny. It's like it's like in a single digit percentage. Then you have to build the rest of the things around it. Like, you have to build the trust. You have to build the you have to build the content.
Alexander Volodarsky:You have to build a lot of things, like reviews and case studies and all this stuff. And we missed it. We missed it pretty early. We should have done it right away. So we had to work on this, you know, enjoy the, like, everyone loves us for the for 6 months, and then just get down and and work on on on building trust.
Alexander Volodarsky:Not only on on our website, but, like, all over the Internet. We didn't do it, and, like, this is what we're working on right now, but this is what we missed. That's why we which we decided to go in a little more pragmatic. Maybe we'll come back to the to the style of brand in the future, but right now, we just have different goals.
Michael Houck:So once you made that decision to rebrand, how did you sort of execute that and deliver the news to clients, to the world, on on social media, and things like that? Like, what was the actual tactics that you use that other founders could, could learn from?
Alexander Volodarsky:Nothing special, by the way. We're just from brand net. We just moved the clients. We fired a lot of clients, by the way. Because we back then, we're trying to, you know, like, oh, let's keep that model and this model because we made money.
Alexander Volodarsky:And it's you know, I'm Jewish, so it's, for a Jew, it's really hard to let go of the revenue existing. So, but like at some point we said like, we need to focus, so we find a lot of clients. We moved the clients that were like in this business model. Yeah, it will be pretty easy. What actually benefit me is building in public, and like going through rebranding in public and, was very beneficial.
Alexander Volodarsky:By the way, it's also a part part of the brand because when you're building in public and you're transferring what's going on in the company, you're building, the trust from other founders, especially if you if other founders is your target audience, this is part of the brand. And later on, like, we had a goal at at 1 year, we had a goal to get to $10,000,000 revenue of GB. And, I started repeating this like crazy every day. Every day, I was talking about this, talking about that little list to the extent that people really remembered us, remembered that we this is our goal, this is our mission, this is like what we're working on, and they would, actually even pay even more attention to us.
Michael Houck:Yeah. I wanna talk about building in public too. You've done an incredible job building your kinda founder brand, both on x and also on on LinkedIn too. I talked to Tivo about this when I had him on the podcast recently also, but curious on your opinion. Do you think that building in public is still a good strategy in 2025?
Michael Houck:You know, the thought would be that AI is making products easier to build, and so putting out your sort of secret sauce or how you're doing things process wise might not be as beneficial to the company anymore. Do you think that's true?
Alexander Volodarsky:Personally, if you're building in public, you know, you have to know, like, why you're doing this. If you're doing this for marketing purposes, you have to know, like, what are you talking about? Like, I'll I'll give you an example. If your target audience is other founders, yeah, you could talk about numbers. By the way, numbers are not as sexy anymore as they used to be.
Alexander Volodarsky:And you're talking about processes, and you show them what you do, they can work. And I, and I saw some people complain on, on Twitter about like, you know, how some, one guy stole their whole process and landing page. Yeah. I don't think you have security from that, even if you're not building in public, but this can happen too. But like, let's say you are a travel agent.
Alexander Volodarsky:You can also build in public by the way. And I I saw those cases. You can go and talk about all those cases of your people who went on this vacations and the unique things that you find and, and unique travel experiences. And you can still build in public because you're building your persona of the person who's an expert finding these unique things, unique travel experiences. Like you have to know who's your target audience and why you're doing this, not just, you know, just, yeah.
Alexander Volodarsky:Or you could do what Peter Lattell does. He's, you know, lately, he's been instead of, I mean, he's still building public fairly a lot. And he talking about like these challenges with, in engineering and everything, everything he has, but also he shit busts a lot. So, this also works. And he is, I mean, he has grown in the last year or 2 from 100,000 to a half a 1000000 followers.
Alexander Volodarsky:And majority of that was not building in public. Majority of that was just being very opinionated, and like just being vocal about this, all these problems in Europe that he about, and in business, etcetera. I think you can still do really good in public, building public, but you have to really understand who's your target audience and what would they appreciate. It used to be much easier because there was like just few of us who did it, right? Thibaut, and then me, and you, and like, it was just pretty easy.
Alexander Volodarsky:You could talk about numbers, and people were like actually nerding, or like, oh, this guy just grew 20% this month, amazing how he did it, and people were really liking this stuff. It's not anymore, so you have to find your way. But I think building, being transparent is, is, is, first of all, it's skill, but secondly, I think it's a, it's an advantage. Being transparent is, is a big advantage.
Michael Houck:If numbers aren't resonating as much going into 2025, what are the formats, the topics that you think people who wanna use social media as a, you know, content marketing channel, what what should they be doing instead?
Alexander Volodarsky:You have to know your audience and and you have to relate to them. That's how you build in public. Like, you have a company, and you're discovering a new ways to grow it in marketing, and you can talk about experiments, product experiments, marketing experiments. If you're learning something new that you, you didn't know before, like you're applying AI to your processes, and something you're learning and sharing. This is a way of building in public.
Alexander Volodarsky:You know, you just you you're not saying I'm already an expert, but here, I'm learning and applying this and let's start with me. I think it's gonna work. It's really depends. Like, I gave you an example with a tour guide not tour guide, tour agent, and she did really well on her local market, and she was very popular without spending a dime on marketing anything. We were just on Facebook, just sharing all those all those tours that, like, no one actually takes.
Alexander Volodarsky:Everyone takes, like, the regular tours that, you know, to HanKun tours that, like, everyone takes, but she's just open, and she finds this stuff, and she shares how she found it and why it's unique and, you know, why you should go there and there and why it's important to go there and not there. If you like just sharing, look about this all those guys who who are talking about, like real estate, right? There's so many yeah, you don't have to, you don't you have to give up the numbers, but you could talk about, like, why this property is better than the other property, why, you know, what kind of problems you can run into. There's a guy, Ali, I forgot his name, what he did, he just shared a, like, 20 second video every day. He was building a building, he was building a, an apartment building in, in Brooklyn, I think.
Alexander Volodarsky:And it was just shared for like, for the whole year, I think. He shared like 20 second clips and she just went every day consistently. She did, he did it. I think it's amazing. He gained a lot of followers.
Alexander Volodarsky:He he gained he gained a lot of friends. And, yeah, you just need to know who's your audience, why you're doing this, and in what way you can build in public that will relate to them.
Michael Houck:Do you guys seem a good portion of your revenue come as a result of this? Like, is this driving the bottom line for you guys?
Alexander Volodarsky:Not today, but in early 2021, in the first two quarters, it gave us, like, 40% of new revenue from that. So the algorithm changed, and I'm not a good writer. So, like, everything that I did came it it was really hard for me. I would spend a lot of time on Twitter just to get into their, like, oh, what people wanna talk about, what people was resonating, and then, like, sitting hours on this pieces of small piece of content, you know, in Google Doc. So it take a lot of time.
Alexander Volodarsky:So when the algorithm changed, I just lost motivation, to be honest, and, I couldn't come back to it. I still believe it could it would, you know, bring a lot of revenue, and I would do it, but, like, I don't know. I just really, just hard truth is I couldn't come back to it. It's really hard to start again. You know?
Alexander Volodarsky:Like, when you're doing something, you're writing something right now, and you're getting, like, I don't know, 2,000 of views. And before you could write a thread, I remember I wrote this thread on 1 person company, and, like, I did, I think, like, 10 threads on that, and every thread was, like, 2,000,000 views. And I was like, amazing. You get someone to top of me, and it was like, yeah. Yeah.
Alexander Volodarsky:I'm king of the world. I can do anything. But now, like, you're writing something, and you're like, oh, this is a banner banger, and then, like, you got, like, I don't know, 3,000 views. It was like, you know, like
Michael Houck:Yeah. I remember this that you did on the one person companies. Those were really interesting.
Alexander Volodarsky:I think this is my, like those are top of my, curve on on Twitter.
Michael Houck:That's the peak.
Alexander Volodarsky:That's the peak. Yeah. The right word.
Michael Houck:Other channels that have worked really well for you guys are actually early on, very interestingly, was Quora. And I I've never really dove deep into Quora myself, so I'm I'm super curious. You said that it drove over $1,000,000 GMV in the 1st years of the business. You know, is how did that work? And is Chorus still sort of an opportunity today?
Michael Houck:So we were unique in
Alexander Volodarsky:Chorus because, we had a pretty big competitor who's well known, and we just went and answered all the questions about them. So, I mean, this is a great tactic by the way, like if you have a competitor who's great, you can go all over the internet, including Google, including all this like Quora and Reddit, and just talk about them. Not in the way, we didn't do it, we didn't like, you know, we didn't say any bad words about them. So like wherever anyone asks about Toptal, I would go and say, oh, this is a, an amazing big company. And, you know, like I heard a lot of good stuff in there, and this is the way we're different.
Alexander Volodarsky:Like we, we could say like big time, like we were faster and cheaper just because we're smaller. We have a smaller network, that's why we know every developer. So we just, you know, just go and show how we're different. And I would very appreciate it just because I got, I got a few, few feedbacks from the clients who came from Quora that I was, I didn't, you know, I didn't say any bad words about them. I didn't, I didn't say anything bad.
Alexander Volodarsky:And, they just, that's why they paid attention, and then they just went on the website, and just consider us an option, and, you know, they choose us at some point. And inquiry, yeah, this is unique about situation. I tried to do a lot on the, like, what is the best, site for freelancers and, you know, etcetera, all these generic more generic questions. They drew some kind of revenue, but not significant. So, like, you could go and answer the questions about your competitors, and it works well.
Alexander Volodarsky:It was a little game like, I don't know how Quora was for now, but, like, Op folds very you know, meant a lot back then on on Quora. So you would have to go, and you have to update, and you had to send to all your friends, oh, here's my answer, please, you know, it was I was that annoying friend that asked for upvotes, but it worked because you get, you get initial, track, you get initial, you know, a few upvotes from your friends, and then they threw you as a test on top, and then you get upvotes from the regular visitors, and they could show you for some time. Then it didn't work, so I dropped it, but, it gave us a pretty good boost, at the beginning.
Michael Houck:Do you think there's a new site or or new opportunity like that if someone's starting a company in 2025?
Alexander Volodarsky:Yeah, I think Reddit is, is, is the best place to do that, Astell. I think Reddit is, is growing even more because, it's, it is the place that AI will not be as influent influential in terms of content creation. So I think, yeah, I don't know. Somehow, Reddit is much more protected than Quora and all those places, in terms of maybe because they have like actual moderators and people who are devoted to to to moderate those, those channels. But, like, Quora, I think it's already populated with AI and, and all those places,
Michael Houck:you know. Interesting. So you're you're bullish on Reddit as a platform for people to be, you know, using their Definitely. Definitely. 100%.
Michael Houck:Interesting.
Alexander Volodarsky:And why? The biggest indicator, because we couldn't we could've game it. I mean, you could game it a little bit, but, like, in terms of, like, scale, we couldn't game it. And, this show is just like, if you're gonna do content on Reddit, they're gonna ban you, and you're not gonna be able to do it. I'm sure there's a lot of things going on, but like if you're targeting B2B, especially B2B, I think you can do well.
Alexander Volodarsky:If you're very genuine and open, and you wanna help people. Yeah. You can you can you can bring a little revenue from there too.
Michael Houck:Yeah. Interesting. The the moderators definitely sort of create an environment where AI generated spammy type content, promotional content is really hard to to see results from, so you do have to be more authentic, and you know, there's there's more friction to to creating that, getting it out there.
Alexander Volodarsky:I mean, Twitter too, by the way. I still believe in Twitter a lot. But just in Twitter, you have to have your own audience to be able to to to grow. And Reddit, you're just using someone else's audience. So it's, it's it's it's easier.
Alexander Volodarsky:I mean, I I seem like I have a friend who who who's a indie hacker, and he's tested also his ideas on Reddit without even promoting. He would just talk about it and see what kind of resonation if if it resonates with a target audience. So, yeah, I I I'm so bullish and ready for sure.
Michael Houck:And you guys also used podcasts as a growth channel really effectively too. Podcast ads in particular, I think it can be hard to know whether an offer is gonna resonate through a podcast ad because, you know, someone has to go somewhere else to then engage with that offer. You can't just, like, click the audio podcast and have an action take place. So, yeah, what do you do to to make podcasts successful for you guys?
Alexander Volodarsky:First of all, we were successful only with a few podcasts only, and a lot of them didn't work. What did work is, how it happened. I was a very big fan of MFM, one of the first listeners, and like, I would just jump on anything that Sam and Sean does. And when they said they opened the they're opening the ads for, we didn't have much money, but like when they said, oh, we open ads, I just jump into it without even thinking. And, it worked for us very well because people come and, you know, they, they like, get off on the ideas that the guys share.
Alexander Volodarsky:And it was funny, like me and the salesperson would always know, without listening to the episode of the family, we would know what the guys were talking about, just because after that, there's just fewer number of people who never would become clients, but they come and come with the ideas that were discussed on the website and say, I wanna do this. How much will it make to, how much will it cost to build this idea? That's pretty funny. But, yeah, we grew pretty, pretty messily. And we were growing, through MFN.
Alexander Volodarsky:And, until they sold to HubSpot, even after that, I think at some point it was already maybe a year or even 18 months into the acquisition by HubSpot. We're still getting leads from, from the, from the previous episodes. So, yeah, it was a new case. After that, we tried a lot, a lot of podcasts, big ones. The problem is that, that there's a 2 ways to track the, I I don't wanna say RI because it's hard to track RI, but, like, to track the the return.
Alexander Volodarsky:The first one is direct return. When you know, you you ask where you get to find us, so they say, oh, we find you on this podcast. The other one is, like, building the crowd, the the cloud of awareness. It's hard to track. So when in, in, I wanna say early 2023, when we realized we're losing a lot of money, we don't wanna do this anymore, we cut a lot of expense, so all the podcast that we couldn't trade directly, that we were getting the, the actual ROI from from from the people who say we we found you there, or we could, you know, we would send them to a different page where we could, you know, say, if you go to this page, you're gonna get a discount.
Alexander Volodarsky:So if we couldn't track something, we just stopped advertising with those podcasts. And like a lot of big podcasts went away, most of them. The this week's in startups, we've been advertising over again for 4 years, 3 or 4 years. And the startups for the rest of us, much smaller, but a lot of, you know, loyal audience and, we love them. They're they're great.
Alexander Volodarsky:What really worked for us with the podcast is not scripting the hosts. Because when you're scripting the host, they, you know, even their voice changes, and it's not the way they speak. If you just give them the bullet points of, this is what we wanna address on the ad, and they just speak in their own tone of voice and their own natural way, the people who are listening, who are fans of this of of this influencer, they would, probably much more listen to them than to script the message.
Michael Houck:Wanna get more insights like that?
Michael.Houck:Each week, I actually interview multiple founders. For the ones who don't join the podcast, I write up a case study and share it with all founding journey members. I also write weekly tactical deep dives, share start up opportunities, and analyze trends that I've noticed. We've also got a community of founders and investor and pitch deck database and more fun stuff, like over $60,000 in perks and discounts to help you build, grow, and raise capital for your startup. Go to join.foundingjourney.com to get access.
Michael Houck:Yeah. Just another data point for the importance of authenticity. Right?
Alexander Volodarsky:And you could see the podcast there where people, where where the host doesn't care about sponsors, and they're using 11i is a marketplace, so where the developers go there and click the button, get the discount. And and this post this network from, like, the same this week's, this week's in startups. And you can hear, Jason Calacanis talk about us. I mean, he's not our fan. He barely knows us, but he's, like, you know, he's expressing himself, and he's, like, very active.
Alexander Volodarsky:And he talks in the way how he would speak about, you know, some some news on on the startup scene. And, you know, it's relatable, more noticeable, and, you know, we get a lot of leads from there.
Michael Houck:Yeah. I mean, you guys are are basically a case study in how to use these awareness centric channels, like podcast and also content marketing on on social media in order to drive real revenue. I think a lot of founders struggle with putting dollars, you know, the valuable valuable dollars of the early stages of a new business. They struggle putting those behind channels that don't have, you know, direct response. Right?
Michael Houck:Don't have direct attributable ROI. What gave you the confidence to sort of invest so heavily in these, like, less attribution heavy channels?
Alexander Volodarsky:Because MFM works so well. We've made so much money from it. It was like, yeah, let's let's do this for every podcast. You know? All those guys, you know, with a with a big audiences, I don't wanna name the names, but, like, you were like, yeah, if MFM work, let's try everyone else.
Alexander Volodarsky:And we'll spend like, I think like at least half a $1,000,000 on this podcast. I thought of MFM, I have a $1,000,000 and, you know, some of them worked and most of them didn't work. And, yeah, then we were pretty reckless because we were growing. The market was growing. We said, yeah, let's let's, you know, let's grow at all costs.
Alexander Volodarsky:I was following the hype like everyone else. But instead of everyone is, like, spending their, you know, venture money, we're spending our own money and, like, funding from from the revenue and, like, you know, a few $1,000,000 or or wasted in this time. Yeah. I mean, is that something
Michael Houck:that you think all founders should be doing is, like, exploring these types of channels? You know, we were very intentional about our spend. We are very intentional about our spend, both with my last company, Launch House, and now with my new company, my holding company as well. Do you think more founders should sort of be investing in these awareness channels?
Alexander Volodarsky:I mean, it depends on where you are. It, like, you have to be very intentional in what is your stage, and what is the, what is the basic you need to do, and what is actually you have to do. And, like, if you're in an early stage, spending money on the podcast is a dumb idea, even if you have the money. Like, you have to shift your because you're gonna get all those, like, oh, we're on this podcast, and this mention, and this mention, but it's gonna disrupt you from basics. And we also I'm I'm very guilty on this.
Alexander Volodarsky:Like, you have to be very aware of where you are and what is your goal, and repeat this goal every day because you you get, you know, you get a delusion all the time. And, like, if you're at the beginning, it has to be founder led, sales founder led marketing, has to be like, at the beginning, you have to just understand the target audience. If you're gonna go and spend the, I don't know, 100 ks on, I don't know, I don't wanna say names, but like, you can easily spend 100 ks a month. And, but you lose the you lose the touch with the reality, and you don't know the basics, like the basics for, you know, search engines to find, you know, the basics for explaining what is your service and, you know, why it's important, why you're doing the best service or product. Like, there is a lot of things you have to do at the beginning that is much more important than throwing money at the at the podcast.
Alexander Volodarsky:Like, you have to be very aware of where you are, what you say, and, like, what you have to do, what is your goal.
Michael Houck:I totally agree that founders should be the ones who are doing sales and doing processes first before sort of offloading them to other folks. Sales, I think, more important than basically anything else because you're face to face with the customers. Right?
Alexander Volodarsky:And you have access, and you have access as a founder. You have more access as a founder because if you go if you go, let's say, you you you're part of some kind of network, like YC or Techstars or whatever it is, Hampton, that is like a, network of founders, Like, you you you you're a founder. You have more access at the beginning. If you put the sales manager at the beginning to do all this thing, they're gonna succeed less, and they're gonna take them more time. If you're a founder, you just can do this much faster because you have access to all these people.
Michael Houck:Yeah. That makes total sense. They'll give you your tie they'll give you their time more easily, and they'll also be more open with you because they'll know you can make things happen.
Alexander Volodarsky:Right. 100% there.
Michael Houck:At what point do you think a founder should start to consider hiring, you know, maybe a VP of sales or first sales hire, like, and what should they look for in that person?
Alexander Volodarsky:I build a company, it's profitable, we're making profit, we're a stable company, I love it. Just, I don't wanna give, you know, advice to people who are in different situation, But what worked for me is just to find a person who is as manic as me. Like, as I work until 2 AM, she would work until 2 AM. And, so this was the first question. It's a good thing.
Alexander Volodarsky:I didn't I didn't I didn't look for, like, VP of marketing in the beginning, because, like, I had to find another IC who would replace me, and I couldn't work at something else. Then she helped me to hire another IC, and then we were looking at, like, you know, a more, manager role. So this worked for us, and I think it's a good, it was a good, it was a good move, because if you find a VP of sales, I mean, again, like if you own enterprise sales, and you've raised like $100,000,000 maybe it makes sense to hire someone VP who did it from 0 to, you know, from 0 to a 100,000,000 of sales, and and do that. Maybe it's a great idea. For us, it was the right idea was just find the same maniac as I am, and just to replace me on the in this being as, as intensive in in their work as I did.
Michael Houck:Another thing I wanted to chat about is fundraising. And I think you have some interesting opinions on this because you guys actually did take on some money in the early days, and I think I remember you saying it was the dumbest thing you ever did. So I'm super curious why it was the dumbest thing you ever did, and sort of what went down.
Alexander Volodarsky:So why? Because we didn't have the idea where to spend this money. We had an idea that we can grow with a little more money, and when it came, we said, okay, let's just put it into Google AdWords. Back then it was Google AdWords, and just money left the bank account. It never came back in any form, in form of money, in form of leads, in form of reputation, nothing.
Alexander Volodarsky:We felt that, we felt that we're not coping well with our outside help, and just money will waste it, you know? We didn't, we didn't do it like very, we we we knew we need to we need to raise money, but we didn't say why. So, like, if I would go back in time, and I don't want to, but if I would go back in time and could relieve that, I would probably just just analyze why do I need the money, and how much do I need, And what are what are the implications of the money, and what will be next? Like, what will be, like, in 5 years? If I raise this, my work gonna be in 5 years.
Alexander Volodarsky:Because, like, I didn't answer the question of, do I wanna be a venture story or a bootstrap story? I didn't answer the question, what do I wanna do with the money? And, also, I didn't answer the question, like, am I ready to like, we gave up for for 60 ks, we gave up 17% of the equity. And, back then, I was living in, already in Ukraine. And, I mean, I I don't wanna say it's standard, but it's like, it's not it was not crazy.
Alexander Volodarsky:It's crazy in America, but it's not it's it was not crazy in Ukraine. And, like, now I realized that 17% is, like, so much. It's like, wow. Like, and I, you know, back then, I was thinking about, about the, about the money, not about the equity. That's why it was dumb idea.
Alexander Volodarsky:I would go back, and I would realize, why do I need the money? How would I spend it? And instead of the just spending time or finding investors for this just tiny portion of money, like $60,000 is nothing, I just had to go and just find more clients. That's what I had to do.
Michael Houck:So you're not, you're not anti fundraising, you're just, you know?
Alexander Volodarsky:100% no. So there, there's 2, there's 2, 2 ways of, 2 funding. There's like initial funding where you get angel money, and it doesn't mean that you have to go the venture route, right? And there's venture money. So for the venture money, I'm like, okay, my belief, I don't know it's true.
Alexander Volodarsky:I've never built a venture backed company. I've, I've never invested in a venture backed company, so I have no knowledge in this whatsoever, but it feels like a lot of ideas. Most of the ideas that I see don't need venture funding. If you're not building something that requires a lot of R and D, or like Stripe, for example, right? Stripe needed to do a lot of R and D to comply with all these banks, and they had to do a lot of business development.
Alexander Volodarsky:There's no way, they could do it. Yeah, but the Chajip Thi rapper, I don't think so. Yeah, you could do it without money. You could raise like $100,000 or like $1,000,000 of, you know, right now you can pretty, back then, I think right now too, pretty cheap you can raise there like $1,000,000 As, by the way, the hustle did the same, they raised a $1,000,000. Toptal did the same, they raised like, I don't know how many, like a 1,000,000 or 2 they raised, and they never raised, never raised the venture money.
Alexander Volodarsky:So you can raise the money just to ease your way, but like, the venture money, not everyone needs the venture money, but there are a lot of companies that do, like, Tesla would never do it, you know, like, this guy, I forgot who develops drugs in the space, like, yeah, he cannot fund us with your own money.
Michael Houck:You're talking about Delian with Varda?
Alexander Volodarsky:Yes. Yes. Yes. Exactly. And there have been good ways, but yeah.
Michael Houck:Yeah. You can't you can't bootstrap a drug space creation company.
Alexander Volodarsky:You cannot bootstrap a drug creation company. You cannot, bootstrap a space company. So it's like, yeah.
Michael Houck:In your in your guys' case, did you consider buying that investor out at some point?
Alexander Volodarsky:We did buy we bought 6% back from 1 investor, and we're considering buying more. It's just a a a matter of balance. We don't wanna go crazy and just like clean everything we have in the company just to buy it out. I mean, we work here with our investors. They, they're nice people and paying dividends for that to them, and they're like, that's fine.
Alexander Volodarsky:At some point, yeah, we're thinking about this, and we did this already. It's it feels nice, by the way. It feels very nice.
Michael Houck:Would you ever consider raising
Alexander Volodarsky:more? Not in this company, but, yeah, for sure. Not just in this com I don't see that. I don't see that. I think that this is a big it it will be a big delusion for us.
Alexander Volodarsky:In not in terms of equity, but in terms of, like, focus and stuff. There's a lot of things we can do with our core revenue, and we're very profitable. Like, I could fund, like, how much can I raise on the stage? $5,000,000? I think I can fund this from, from our revenue, not from revenue directly, but I could, we don't need the money right away, right?
Alexander Volodarsky:I could fund from, partially from our revenue, we could take on some debt, and then pay it off. I see other ways, but we have nowhere to prove $5,000,000 to be honest right now. If I sold that I could put $5,000,000 and grow it from, for, from, like, right now, we're at, will be, like, $16,000,000, JNB. We could go from 16 to 50 with like $5,000,000 Yeah, I'll consider some type of funding, probably not venture funding, but some kind of debt. And we have some vault money that we keep, in case of, you know, something happens, like a securitin, blanket.
Alexander Volodarsky:Probably never, if I find the idea, like I'm thinking a lot about healthy food. I'm thinking about a lot of this problem. I think this is one of the biggest problem in in our society. And, like, if I go and do this company, probably I would need to raise money because this is a hard problem. There's a lot of, you know, things to to do before you can launch.
Alexander Volodarsky:And, like, you know, production lines and all that stuff and distribution. I think that's very and there's no way I can fund this myself. That's interesting.
Michael Houck:Yeah. I agree. That's a a huge problem in society, especially in America. So okay. I wanna go back a little bit further even before Coding Ninjas.
Michael Houck:Right? So Lemon Coding Ninjas is actually your 3rd company. You were originally doing an AdSense for images type company, another local classified company in Ukraine. What what happened with those? Why were those not the big idea, the big company that that Lemon has become?
Alexander Volodarsky:Well, the first company, I didn't know what I was doing. I went into to Plunge Classifieds. I'm a very popular, like, you know, a lot of founders in Ukraine were like, yeah. 2013, yeah, I was also trying to do that. So, yeah, I was just not really good.
Alexander Volodarsky:I didn't understand the market. I didn't understand product development. I paid a lot of money to develop this site as a non technical person, and it it just never saw the world. We were like, we were like developing, developing, developing. They were changing a lot of stuff.
Alexander Volodarsky:We tried to do some SEO, and just then I just lost lost interest. In the same company, I was, I I I knew much more, but still, I was not technical, and I had a technical co founder that I was also paying, and they just didn't do anything, basically. They like, for the, I don't remember how many month, maybe like a year of working together, I paid them salary, and they gave them 50% of equity, but they basically didn't, didn't do anything. So like, I did so much, I did so much business development. I went to all major networks in Ukraine and Russia at networks.
Alexander Volodarsky:I don't know if you know, like, like Maille, Rumbler, it's messin networks, like, I don't know, like Yahoo, big, big media companies. And I made a lot of pre sales, you'd say. And they all agreed that, you know, as soon as it launched, they should try it, then, you know, there's possibility over there. But, like, there was never a product, so it was nothing happened.
Michael Houck:It's in the the the graveyard of ideas. Right?
Alexander Volodarsky:Yeah. Yeah. I did a lot of investment in that graveyard. We've all been there.
Michael Houck:Okay. One other thing I wanna dive in with you is hiring because, obviously, you facilitated so many hires at this point. You know,
Alexander Volodarsky:you're an advocate of the sort of
Michael Houck:paid trial work trial model that Lanier has also talked about a lot on on x. Why are why are these paid trials sort of beneficial to both parties, And, you know, what's the process for sort of setting one up?
Alexander Volodarsky:It is one of the business models, that we came up pretty recently, I think it was like a year ago. So the idea is like you, like it's basically dating before we're getting married, and it's just cheap dating. Like if you go if you go into the, into the employee employer relationship without, like, after spending like 5 hours together, you know, they don't know the product, they don't know the culture. I mean, if it's say Facebook or Google, they know the culture, they can read a lot about it, and you can send, like, you know, some secondary signals, you know, you know, letting people talk about you on Glassdoor and all this stuff. But, like, in reality, it's not.
Alexander Volodarsky:So, like, we came up with this product where you can come and work with a person for 4 or 5 weeks, work on some project, pay by hourly, And then and then if you like them after this, you just hire them. So they they are devoted to your product, so they don't go in and work somewhere else. So you have the talent. If if if you wanna hire them, you can hire them after this 4 or 5 weeks. I think it's 4 weeks.
Alexander Volodarsky:And you don't have to invest in recruiting fee. You don't have to invest in, hiring, doing all the social stuff, you know, getting them benefits and everything. You don't have to do that. You just put them on contract for for a couple weeks, work on a project, see if they're a good fit, and decide if you wanna work together. The same for developer, for engineer, like, you know, they're jumping.
Alexander Volodarsky:I mean, it's a little easier for you because they don't have, like, hiring and firing fees, but it's still like they, they went and, you know, they didn't know what is aborting like, and they just say, yeah, I gotta work on this. When you're really doing something, it's really hard to subbing for everything. Right? If you're already like, like, a lot of relationships are like this, like I'm already in this relationship, say whatever. So like, this is, this is one of the things where you can go and try this, this company and see what is the onboarding like?
Alexander Volodarsky:What is the, you know, product like? Is it a product? Is it a good product? What is the culture like? And then in 4 weeks, you're gonna decide if you wanna stay on that.
Alexander Volodarsky:Of course, if the developer, if the employer wants the developer and the developer doesn't wanna say we're gonna replace it, but usually it works well. There are also cases that works well, and people, just get even more excited because they had this, you know, taste of how it's working together, and they they work with them for a longer time.
Michael Houck:What do you think is the number one thing that founders should be evaluating during that time when they're thinking about hiring someone on one of these trials and maybe just in general when they're evaluating higher?
Alexander Volodarsky:Yeah. They have just jumped on the project as soon as possible. Just cut cut everything else, and just have them work on something, even small, just have them finish something, and see. You could you could see a lot of things from there. Are they good with deadlines?
Alexander Volodarsky:Are they is it a good culture? Do they ask questions? Are they, you know, how do they interact with other people? And, you know, it's, just jump, like day 2, day 1 is like, oh, here's the old access, and you have half a day off. Day 2, you know, here's a here's a backlog, and I want you to work on, you know, x, y, z, and just work on that.
Michael Houck:Let's let's say that a founder is non technical, right? And let's say that they're hiring an engineer or maybe someone working on the data science side, how can they, as the founder, evaluate them? Like, obviously, they can rely on other people on their team to give them opinions, but how how should they, as a founder, sort of evaluate someone who is technical from a nontechnical perspective?
Alexander Volodarsky:Even more on my previous point, like, just jump on a project, have something visible that they can do within the 4 weeks, even like 3 weeks, and then you have an extra week to evaluate this, and just work back and forth. Yeah, you will see, whatever you value, you will see in this project. Because as a non technical confederate, you don't value code as much. You can rely on other people to tell you this is a good code or not good code. It's a good architecture, not good architecture.
Alexander Volodarsky:But like, you can see, like, the soft skills that you value as a founder, how people interact with you with the team. Are they nice? Are they, you know, dedicated? Are they whatever? You you can see all the things, working on the project.
Michael Houck:Yeah. I agree. You really just need to see momentum, how the other people on the team work with them and how they they them, basically.
Alexander Volodarsky:By the way, I did this, I did this where we did a recent sales hire, and we did the same thing. Myself, I'm not really good in onboarding. I always said, okay, onboarding onboarding went went much harder. So we we threw them right now right away on sales. I think day 3, they're already making sales calls.
Alexander Volodarsky:And, it was really harder on onboarding because we had a lot of automations and processes they have to get into, it was a little bit more painful, but I could see them with a client on the day 4 or 5. I could just go and listen to their calls, give them feedback. It was amazing. They outperformed the 2nd months already.
Michael Houck:So one decision, with the team that you made that I think caused people to talk a lot about on social media was when you guys were obviously growing, and then you decided to focus the business and lay some people off on the team. And I think you wrote a post about this, and it went super viral, and people were giving a lot of opinions on it. Why was that the right decision for the business even when it's growing?
Alexander Volodarsky:It's really it's really pretty that you call it death threats as a as a different opinion. Yep. So, yeah, we had to let go of 10% of the team. All of them were most of them were in marketing. Yeah.
Alexander Volodarsky:It was not a it was not a popular idea. Of course, people get a lot of hate and became popular in all the social media. I tweeted us, and they were, like, they were posting the screenshot on Reddit, and, like, I I was, yeah, I was a, I I was a man of the day back then. I even tweeted to, I even texted to Nick Huber, right, from, Pope. Yep.
Alexander Volodarsky:Because he gets a lot of hate. I was like, do you have to be proud of me right now? He was like, yeah, welcome to the club. Yeah. We would would we were not doing really well on on on marketing.
Alexander Volodarsky:We did a lot of that bad decisions, and it was really hard to see the path how to make it successful. I didn't see it. The team didn't see it. And, so, so, like, the the the the best way was to part ways for us and for them. So because, like, yeah, all of them found jobs really quickly.
Alexander Volodarsky:We get we get severance. All of them found jobs really quickly, and, like, I cannot judge if they're more happy or less happy than the company, but in our company was a real struggle because I'm not a good marketer. I'm not a good marketer leader, so I could not fix whatever was not working, and they couldn't fix whatever was not working. So, like, yeah, I I couldn't imagine they were helping our company. And, I I just assumed they were much more happy over there.
Alexander Volodarsky:It was a hard time for us to No.
Michael Houck:I didn't know it had escalated to that degree. I thought you just got some some, some little hate comments on Twitter. I didn't know it was, death threats and crazy stuff on Reddit.
Alexander Volodarsky:I think it it had, like, maybe 5,000,000 views on Twitter, and then, like, and then another who knows how much on Reddit and all these all these places? Yeah. It was okay. I mean, like, also maybe I misrepresented it, because like, yeah, we let go people, and I also put a percentage how many people let go. So it probably didn't look good, so miscommunication from my side.
Alexander Volodarsky:But, yeah, I mean, hate on Twitter comes and goes. Like, people don't remember you. Like, there's so many stuff happening. Like, people don't remember you in 5 hours. Yeah.
Alexander Volodarsky:They're gonna on you, and, yeah. Yeah. Whatever.
Michael Houck:Yeah. I've, I've been there. I've been the the hated person of the day too. It happens with the best of us. And I think, you know, people don't get to see the context that goes into
Alexander Volodarsky:No one cares about the context. No one cares about the context. No one cares about the context.
Michael Houck:Yeah. Like, obviously, it sounds like it's the right decision for the business and for the for everybody involved. So, yeah, sounds like it's the right call.
Alexander Volodarsky:And the business, we we we didn't know we're gonna survive, and now we we are so profitable, I can't believe this is happening. Great. Not because we let the people go, the the salaries was like a teeny tiny portion. We just started making better decisions. Yeah, we faced that we made bad decisions, and we analyzed what was bad, what was not working, and, like, what what what else we have to do.
Alexander Volodarsky:And, like, we went through a shit period. I mean, I know I know, like, people who are not founders think of, yeah, what are you talking about? It was hard for you? You let people go, then now they have to go work look for work? No, for the founder, it's also a place to be, you let go, you're a failure right now, and you have to analyze what failed, or you can get into your hat and be in depression forever.
Alexander Volodarsky:But if you don't wanna do that, you have to analyze, you have to analyze how you failed, what you did, and like, we now, we make much, much better decision. The letting go people didn't make even a drop difference in our revenue P and L, but like making better decisions, yeah, definitely. We went from negative 100 of 1,000 of dollars to positive. It's just crazy.
Michael Houck:Yeah. I mean, it sounds like it was obviously the right decision for everybody involved. So cool. Okay. We have a couple rapid fire outro questions here that I like to ask.
Michael Houck:So first one is, you know, obviously, it doesn't need to be somebody you took money from yourself, but just who's an investor
Alexander Volodarsky:that other founders should take capital from and and why? At the beginning, investors should be someone who can learn from. Like if you're doing a teen app, you should take money from Nikita Beur, right? He could invest in your money and he could advise in you without paying extra money for advising, but you can learn from them, right? So, I think early on, this is important.
Alexander Volodarsky:Someone who can add value, accept the money. It's hard to find, but like, if you actually care about your company, would spend more time on this, finding people who would, who was that? Someone launched, was it Mercury who launched and they took money from all its influencers on, tech influencers? And everyone was talking about Mercury, and they were getting so much love just because like, you just, you just got endorsement from the people who you cannot buy endorsement from, right? I think it was Mercury, I'm not sure.
Alexander Volodarsky:But like, this is a smart move because like you can get a lot of added value from the people who invest.
Michael Houck:Yeah. People who provide distribution have, crazy leverage right now, and they'll probably only continue to increase. Next one, what's one thing that you would change about the startup world?
Alexander Volodarsky:And the hype of venture capital, and just think as as a tool, and get the hype to the of a profitability. I read this book, Profit First, changed my life. I, I really recommend to everyone. And if someone is a founder, and they, you know, want want me to give them a a free book, I bought, I think, like, 50 books to different founders. Just DM me on Twitter, and, and I will I will gift you this book.
Michael Houck:Oh, wow. That's an awesome offer. Thanks for doing that for
Alexander Volodarsky:I love doing this. It's changed my life. And I'm I'm sure if you're a founder that already makes revenue, it's important book. You don't have to follow it. Maybe maybe it's not your story, but just to read, I'm getting to mindset of of being more mindful about your decisions.
Alexander Volodarsky:It's it's a very important book.
Michael Houck:What's your number one best piece of advice for a first time founder?
Alexander Volodarsky:Don't listen to to to advice. I think this is the best advice. I don't know. Yeah. But does it count?
Michael Houck:Yeah. That I mean, that that counts as follow
Alexander Volodarsky:your gut, I guess. You read so many opinions, but they are worthless. Worthless. There's no worth in any advice. And I was, I was like, at some point on Twitter, I was like, talking about like how we did it and was advice, and then I was like, why are you doing advice?
Alexander Volodarsky:Like, what you Yeah, don't listen to advice, be curious and learn how people get to succeed in stuff, but like, don't listen when people just, you know, trying to unload things on you because they, you know, they have nothing to do with your growth, with, with with your company, and they are not sensitive to what's gonna happen from your advice from their advice. So, like yeah.
Michael Houck:Alright. Last one. What's something that you believe that most people disagree with you about?
Alexander Volodarsky:Profitable sign ups, probably. Yeah. Building a profitable tech company, I think a lot of people think it's a bull. And, again, I don't I I I don't think this is applicable to everyone, but I think I saw Brex become profitable. I saw I don't remember how to spell the company.
Alexander Volodarsky:This, Brex competitor, Meow, I think, could say that became profitable. I think Replit became profitable, but still yeah. It's a long way, and I think it's it's very important.
Michael Houck:We're definitely seeing that trend, as we head into 2025. Where can folks find that? Where can they find you? Or should they follow you?
Alexander Volodarsky:You can find me on Twitter at, Volodarik, the OLODArik. And, yeah, if you have any questions, I'm open. My DMs are open. I'm open to answering them. Happy to help and not give advice.
Alexander Volodarsky:You heard it
Michael Houck:here first, guys. No advice from Alexander, but you can reach out.
Alexander Volodarsky:I'll go. I'm happy to talk. Yeah. Definitely.
Michael Houck:Cool. Well, hey, man. Thanks for coming on. This was great. Yeah.
Michael Houck:Great to have you on, and and, thank you.
Alexander Volodarsky:It was a fun conversation. Thank you very much. Cool.
Michael Houck:See you. Bye.
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