Arvid Kahl: Today, I'm talking to Josh Pigford. He is the
founder of Maybe and he recently open sourced the whole codebase
for this financial software tool. He also sold Baremetrics a
couple years ago for $4 million. So this project now is a
continuation of his interest in the financial industry and
dealing with money. I talked to Josh about all kinds of things
about involving people from the community and building your
product about raising money for something that could also be
bootstrapped and how to manage such a thing in a community and
an industry that is usually pretty slow to take up new
technology. Enjoy this conversation between me and
Josh. The whole conversation is sponsored by acquire.com. Now
here is Josh.
Josh, thanks so much for coming on the show. You've been giving
a building in public master class over the last few weeks
and I really enjoyed it. Let's talk about maybe, what is it?
Why are you building it in public? And why are so many
people so excited about it right now?
Josh Pigford: Yeah, well, thanks for having me on. So maybe it's
something that started back in 2021, post exit of a previous
company and we spent the better part of 18 ish months building
that not in public really, launched it and found ourselves
in a pickle, where we had gone the sort of typical VC route,
hired a lot. And then we launched the thing and
essentially ran out of money to be able to see it through to
grow it. So we found ourselves on the spot where we'd be like,
downsize the whole team to like two or three of us and
ultimately shut it down. And then a few weeks ago, I got
really nostalgic and decided to open source the whole thing. And
that hit a nerve and now it's alive again and we've raised
some more money, but rebuilding the company differently this
time. But yeah, people are pretty pumped about Sienna, the
FinTech software, the insides of it. So
Arvid Kahl: That's the surprising part to me, too, like
FinTech tends to be a very closed source ecosystem. And you
just throwing it out there and open source like, how did you
come to that kind of conclusion to just throw it out there?
Because you could have done many different things, right, you get
to just restarted hired outsourced all that, but open
source, that's a pretty solid choice.
Josh Pigford: I well. So I had, I really wasn't thinking that
anything. In my head, the the choice is sort of binary, and
that either this, this stays in a private Git repo, and no one
ever sees it. The end member had no plans of reviving it anyway.
And so it was that or make it open source. And then like,
maybe somebody can do something with it. And it was so complex,
that it wasn't the kind of it was, it was never the kind of
thing that I was gonna build, just grab the repo and like,
deploy it and have their own version of maybe like we had
sort of over engineered it for a multitude of reasons. But it
was, you know, even now, we're a few weeks and have 10s of 1000s
of people like seeing it and like it still is kind of a
hassle to get it up and running. So like, it was more of just a
Yeah, I'm curious what other people will do with it.
Curiosity more than anything. Cool.
Arvid Kahl: Yeah, I see you rehired one of your software
engineers to me, that's so I love this. I love the cyclical
nature of this. There's,
Josh Pigford: there's more of that. There's more of that
coming. Oh, wow.
Arvid Kahl: That's cool. I was reading Sachs tweets about it.
And it was pretty interesting, because he gave some very
transparent insight into the back then. And then now of where
the vision goes. And apparently, he was talking about a lot of
compliance stuff like, version one had a lot of requirements,
because you had a lot of advice, financial advice they were
giving. And version two, the open source version doesn't have
that. Can you just kind of elaborate on that choice? And
why? Yeah.
Josh Pigford: So when we first started, it was the impetus for
maybe was, was sort of exited barometric so that company took
home close to 4 million like me personally. And so what is the
situation we found ourselves in was, us, me and my wife was
we've got all this money from this exit, I want to not blow
it. So I started working with financial advisor. And that was
the first time first time we've ever worked with a new advisor
or planner or whatever. So it's like, I've got this mix of we're
doing this and I have all the free time in the world. And I
can dig into like, what is what does a financial adviser do? How
do they grow our money? Um, and why are we paying them a
percentage of the assets that they're managing? And so that's
when I like went deep dive into this, this that whole world
realizing like oh, they're not doing anything all that great to
warrant taking a percentage of assets. However, it is nice to
have a third party kind of like gut check you on some stuff. So
the idea was we'll build this like modern platform for
managing You're on finances. But with that will tack on and a
financial advisor as part of your account. And that choice,
though, meant that we've got an infinite number of regulatory
things to comply with. And so that added a ton of overhead, it
meant that we could only be in the US. I mean, we could expand
other places, but like, we would have to meet all the regulatory
requirements and all of those countries too. And so that very
quickly sort of limited us on sort of addressable market, how
fast we can move on things, tech choices, because there's things
like we have to keep, and, you know, an unchangeable copy of
every single interaction for like, seven years or something
like, there's just a lot of a lot of tech choices that that
forced. And so that made overhead very high and text that
complicated, like all sorts of stuff, but now we're saying
we're not doing that anymore. There's no advice component, we
can rip out half the code. Like, that's sort of where we're at.
But
Arvid Kahl: that's cool. Yeah, that's awesome. And I think just
kind of shaving off complexity is generally a good idea, right?
If you want to revive something that was too expensive to run.
So I kind of I kind of really appreciate that that logic makes
sense to, do you think that people are going to build their
own advice systems on top of on top of this, because right now,
you're kind of just supplying the way to gather data
Josh Pigford: correctly? I guess you could, I mean, you know,
there's, it's not in the current sort of most recent commits. But
like, if you go to the very first commit of the thing, that
open source a few weeks ago, the whole like, advice dashboard is
there. So like, you could build and we had built a very full
featured, a certified financial adviser could go in, and it's
like a whole thing for them to manage their clients and
interact with him, like a chat system, uploading videos and
audio, like tons of stuff. That's there, if somebody wants
to grab it and do something with it, but it does, it comes with
regulatory overhead. And at this point, we're not interested.
Yeah,
Arvid Kahl: that's, that sounds very complicated. And it sounds
like very hard to monetize as well. Because you know, that,
that just the increase in costs and all that, that probably
makes it hard to get a cut how you're going to monetize this
open source kind of system. Yeah,
Josh Pigford: so pretty typical. I mean, you know, the, I think
the example most people would understand are sort of like,
see, the correlation is like WordPress, where, you know, it
was wide open source for ages. And then they did like
wordpress.com. And so you can have your own hosted WordPress,
essentially the same thing, I don't think it's a little less,
it's a little more consumer, I guess. And on our side, where
we're not gonna, like, talk about maybe is like, get your
own hosted version of like, we're not gonna use that
language, I guess it's just, you'll go to the maybe a website
and sign up for an account. And that's that. But there is, it's
sort of the hosted version that you'll pay for, will just be the
version that you know, most of civilization uses. And the open
source stuff is like, it's available for those that want to
self deploy and all that stuff. That
Arvid Kahl: seems to be one of the few but very promising ways
of monetizing any kind of open source project, right should
keep you keep the core free, you keep itself deployable, but you
kind of have these added services or just the
Josh Pigford: well, there's things especially in the
financial world, where, you know, like connecting all your
bank accounts. There's all these different data aggregators,
plaids, sort of the most well known one. And very few, I mean,
quite literally, probably 99% of these aggregators across the
world don't have an option for an individual to use them. They
just require enterprise contracts and stuff. So you
know, on the on the hosted version of maybe that will, will
offer for pay, that will include those data aggregators, where
you're not having to sort of manually import CSVs and things.
Whereas a self hosted most of that will be either manually
inputting data, or uploading a CSV or something like that. So
so
Arvid Kahl: there's the upsell, now I get it, I was wondering
just a little bit where that value would be of a hosted
version. But of course, like you having the capacity to get these
aggregators, and I was, I was thinking a lot about this,
because ever since I moved from Europe to Canada, like the
automate, automate ability of my financials has just gone down
the drain. It's like super crazy, the kinds of standards
that Europe has or Germany with, you know, the in FinTech, there
are API's that every single bank has to offer, and you can kind
of fetch data from there does not exist here. When I go to my
bank here in Canada, it's like, yeah, you can kind of copy and
paste it from the website, if you like. It's like, it's, it's
really hard to pull that into anything else. So how is that
like, you come from a place where within a day, you can
build something really cool. You can refactor if you want it to
your whole code base and 24 hours right? Let's go a tweet at
you throw out a couple a couple days ago. You could and nobody
can stop you. But working with these banks working with these
particular interstates, and I guess if you expand to other
places like Canada, with these very self contained places How
are you approaching that kind of integrability.
Josh Pigford: So what we're working on right now is
essentially standardizing the data model on our side. And
then, and then everything will have to sort of meet that. So
like, Will will make it so that, you know, we build a plan
integration, even just for us to use, but it'll then have, its,
it'll be sort of self contained, and then just pull in and
process the data so that it matches our data model. So, you
know, it ends up being anybody can build a data source sort of
plug in or something that depending on where they're
located, or whatever, you know, eventually this stuff all
becomes like integrated with maybe
Arvid Kahl: that's interesting. It's kind of like a Zapier for
financial data that
Josh Pigford: yeah, essentially, it is, it's like, a lot of the
banking data includes more sort of detail than is actually
necessary for the average sort of financial application. So
it's like, we can we can standardize or sort of reduce
the complexity into, you know, money and money out kind of
thing, in most cases. And it gets a little bit more
complicated when you're talking about investments and buying and
selling things and whatever. But the idea is, we can sort of
standardize all that stuff and, and simplify the incoming data.
Todd
Arvid Kahl: reminds me so much of that one XKCD, always about
like, there's 15 standards for this kind of thing, let's just
implement the standards for all standards. And now there's 16
standards for that kind of thing. Right? It's fun, though,
I think it's just necessary, right? If you want to be able to
integrate with all these platforms, and there is no Core
standard or Central Standard, you just have to establish an
interface for it. I love the idea. Because once that is
established, and is also fully documented and communicated to
your community of contributors, and people who are interested in
using it, they can start building these extensions, and
you can kind of add them to the system as they come. And they
can also be externally maintained, which is really
cool. Is that like an ongoing plan to just like, give the
community the opportunity to keep building and maintaining
these things? Are you going to pull them all in? I
Josh Pigford: think so there's a little bit, the only sort of, I
guess, hesitation or risk of having too much external stuff
is security. When you're talking about financial stuff. I think
the state like linking out to stuff that's like, hey, download
this thing that pulls in your banking data, like, that feels a
little bit feels a little risky. So yeah, I feel like we would
need to have some sort of, you know, we have an internally
hosted is set of Doc directory of plugins or something I don't
know, that's been vetted and made sure that it's not, you
know, scraping your data or something. But um, yeah, I don't
know. I think it may be one of those things that the self
hosting crowd ends up having their own sort of lots of
plugins to choose from. And this is kind of the case, again, to
the WordPress example, like, you can install plugins on
wordpress.com. But like, there's some limitations to that, right?
Like, you're not going to have the full breadth of plugins to
choose from. So yeah, I don't know, we're still that's still
super early. So yeah,
Arvid Kahl: and I would love to just kind of your brainstorm
these kind of things, I find them very interesting. Because
when you're, when you're at this point, now starting just to
build the potential for a plugin marketplace, if that would even
be the name for it, or just a repository that is kind of
validated and tested and secured. Like, there are so many
different ways. If you look at WordPress, the example is great,
I think you can, you can install manually, like any plugin
anywhere, it can be locally installed, but it kind of has to
go to adhere to the restrictions. Or you can just
choose one of the ones that they have pre approved, right, that
are securely located in there, the big list of things that are
wonderful, and you just click on it, and it's right there, right?
That that kind of duality, gives you some choice as a platform
maintainer, to just want to offer and how to secure it that
that's a really cool thing, too.
Josh Pigford: Yep. Well, and that sort of jumps into another
way that we're thinking about this. And I've tweeted about
this a little bit like the concept of maybe being your
like, the sort of OS for personal finance, where, you
know, internally, we talked about having apps or modules
such that, you know, you could potentially build your own sort
of module that's got its own set of like tools for whatever
specific stage of life you're in or something like that. I think
we'll have our own stuff that we're building, but the idea of
being able to create your own Yeah, watch this thing.
Arvid Kahl: Yeah. And any kind of standardized interface makes
perfect sense for that. Right. That's, that's fun. Yeah,
standalone. Absolutely. That kind of reminds me of a tweet
that you just sent prior to this conversation about once like the
stuff that Basecamp people have been doing. Is that kind of the
taste that you have for these apps just to be just standalone,
instead of being hosted on something else?
Josh Pigford: Not necessarily. I am most curious about the ones
stuff from a deployment perspective, like how easy
they've made it to sort of self host, in this case camp fire
their first app. I like that idea, at least as far as some
sort of inspiration around making the maybe app itself sort
of self postable. Making it where it's, you know, you copy
and paste this one, literally single command into the command
line, and then it walks you through everything else. Like,
that's, that's sort of, to me is like, sort of the gold standard
for self postable. But also like modifiable codebase. Yeah,
Arvid Kahl: I have some very recent experience with that kind
of stuff in the PHP ecosystem. Like my most recent Sass
projects are both built on Laravel. And Laravel, has this
incredible ecosystem, like there are like billing portals and
back end admin portals and all that, that you just pull into
the package management system, you still have to kind of log in
with your, you know, account or API key, if it's a paid system,
or some of them are free. It's a very interesting monetization
model that too, but it all gets pulled into composer, which is
kind of the the NPM of PHP, for anybody working with JavaScript,
right? The idea is to just have it be hosted somewhere, you pull
it in, and then it's right there. And maybe it's kind of
just a vendor thing, it works in the background, but you can
expose the actual contract files and the view files. And you
know, what the way it looks like the what text is in there, just
how the database is connected all of that yourself and just
keep building on top of it. And I think once in the Ruby world,
that is the idea of having the standard on Ruby apps, or it's
doing the exact same thing. It's, it's a very interesting
approach, and kind of a novel and not so novel approach, it
reminds me very much of the beginnings of open source
software, right, it's kind of a cycling back, let's, let's talk
a little bit about tech choices. Because like, I think 40 to 50%
of your tweets over the last couple days have been about
tech, like just straight up JavaScript or rails, like which
to do to do which to take which to choose which not to do is can
it just kind of give me a glimpse into your mind regarding
to picking a tech stack for a project like this? And why? And
what what kind of concerns you have in picking this?
Josh Pigford: Yeah, so we're in a super weird spot with maybe
where are you know, if I'm building something, myself, but
no one else is involved, I'm choosing rails 100% of the time,
um, and previous company Baremetrics were Rails app. When
I started, maybe, in 2021, I had no plans of building any part of
it. I mean, like, from a coding perspective, at least. And, and
I think that choice at the time was coming off of like, I hadn't
really been building much of anything, the prior few years,
because I was in full on CEO mode. And so I think, in part, I
didn't feel equipped to be able to build this financial app at
the time. And so it was like, well, I'll hire some, I'll hire
engineers, and they can talk amongst themselves and choose
and whatever, like, it doesn't really matter to me, because I'm
not coding any of this. Um, so that resulted in React being the
sort of base for it, react and next Jas, and a few other bits
and pieces. I mean, that's, you know, was and still is, on a lot
of levels, like the the most popular sort of tech stack. And,
and so it was like, Okay, let's do that, because there's a huge
pool of developers, you know, available for that, etc. So that
was the, that was like a choice that was made in early 2021.
And, you know, we just went with it. Now, where we're at at this
point is, we've revived this thing, it's still that same tech
stack. But you know, as we were talking, before we started
recording, that whole world has changed drastically since 2021.
And it's changed drastically in the past six months. And so now
we're at this place of like, okay, we're already having to
rip out a ton of code. Because of that, there's so much in
there for the compliance stuff. And the features that aren't
part of the app anymore, we're already having to rip out stuff,
a lot of the stuff, a lot of stuff just doesn't work, because
like, the JavaScript world changes so fast, and whatever
packages have updated, and they're no longer compatible
with each other and whatever else. And so it's kind of a
dumpster fire from like a compatibility perspective of all
the different bits and pieces. So now, the thing we're playing
around with, in our heads and talking amongst ourselves about
is, what if we, we rebuilt it in Rails? Obviously, that reduces,
and this is the discussion that's been happening on Twitter
for the past 72 hours is you've reduced the number of available
developers, then Bush, my argument there is but you
increase the quality of developer Oh, that's what I want
to be clear. I'm not trying to burn Anyone here because I think
it's the, the reality is so many people brand new devs, of
course, that the tech stack that they're learning is the thing
that's most being hired for. So like, I don't fault people for
that, it's just there happens to be a lot of very, very green
developers in that world. Fine, totally cool. Nothing wrong with
that. Um, but I think that also means you end up with a lot
more. And we've found this to be the case already in our OSS repo
for maybe is like, a lot of the discussions are like people sort
of, you know, arguing semantics of code versus just writing some
code. And it's very easy to argue about the way you should
or shouldn't do things, instead of just making decision and
building the thing. And so, I tend to find that most people in
the Rails world, air towards, let me let me ship something
over, let me like, try to get this code in some sort of
standardized way, or, I don't know, like this argue about that
stuff a lot, a lot less that still exists. But either way,
that's sort of where we're at is, like, we already know, the
data model behind maybe is set, like how we organize all the
data, and then how all these things sort of relate to one
another, I think is very solid. And a lot of these big decisions
have already been made. So then it becomes, okay, let's just get
the infrastructure around it rebuilt. And I joked about
building in 24 hours. But like, last summer, when we started,
like trying to simplify some stuff as a proof of concept, I
rebuilt the maybe like net worth dashboard stuff in like five
days, like, by myself. And so I think it's very doable to you
know, I think one of the other tweets I said was like, in 30
days, I think I could rebuild the entire thing. And I do think
that that's true. Now, you know, certainly people disagree with
that being a possibility, but like, Well, I think it's
possible. And so we're just sort of looking into that. I mean,
you know, later today, we've got a call with a number of people
who have very deep ties in like the JavaScript world that can
potentially, like change our minds on some of that stuff.
But, um, we're just sort of not I don't want to, like make a
keep doing something just because like, that's the code
that's there. And then we end up sticking with something we're
constantly trying to backtrack or undo stuff or like, I don't
know, just just there's a lot of overhead that I think comes with
the JavaScript ecosystem. Yeah,
Arvid Kahl: for sure this is done. And there's the risk of
just sunk cost fallacy kind of behavior, right? You don't want
that either. Just because you've invested time into this doesn't
mean it's a good choice. And honestly, I've been doing a lot
of JavaScript like I was, I wasn't around to the
CoffeeScript days of 2000, like nine and 10, and stuff. And it
was a good time, and it's stuff was developing, and it still is,
I've never stopped developing, right? It's not like there,
there ever is like an end point to where this goes, it's just
developed so fast. That's just what you said, the libraries
you're using today might have a major version update tomorrow
that requires you to integrate TypeScript or whatever, and then
all of a sudden, you have a completely new thing to put into
your stack. And it just makes it brittle, which is, I think, why
there is this massive discussion around best practices, because
people want to avoid this brittleness of their code,
knowing that over time, it's just gonna decay so fast, you
don't really have this as much in the rails or PHP or an in the
Python community, right? There is there's a lot of standardized
stuff that is just from smartly designed language things, that
JavaScript as a very, you know, evolving language just doesn't
have. But I want to talk about something that is just here to
say like, the outside feedback from the the open source
contribution community, and I want to I recently read a book
called working in public by by Nadia Akbar, it's on stripe
press. It's really nice. It's I think I have it right here. It's
pretty cool. I guess it's a book about open source projects. And
I found a quote in there, which I really liked was about people
who build these projects, if the project management is kind of a
one way mirror, and she she quoted somebody else saying,
like, you wouldn't criticize a painter while they're still
painting that piece. But a lot of the people in open source do
exactly that, as you're building the code. They're going in there
looking at every leg a little bit and saying this is not
right, this is wrong. How do you deal with this? How do you deal
with the inevitable community originating feature requests and
criticism kind of stuff right now?
Josh Pigford: Yeah, I so this the stance that I've been taking
the replies that I sort of give to people who are making either
filing issues on the repo or even making pull requests. My
response is, generally look, what's the impact of this
decision? Like what are how does how does the entire repo and the
community of developers at large benefit from this change? And
that right there, you know, a lot of the sort of semantic
arguments well, you there's no it's there's not a response. So
that says, This is good for everyone, it ends up being more
of like, well, this is my preference, okay, well, then I
don't care what your preference here is, like I need, we need to
have tangible benefit to making people change the way that
they're doing things or to make this big overhaul that means
people have to go and like, you know, redownload the whole repo
and run a bunch of scripts again, to get it to update or
whatever. Like, it's, it's just, I need an explanation, like you
need to be to make the case for it. And it can't be well, I like
doing it this way. Or it can't be, well, it compiles faster.
Okay, what is faster? About three milliseconds? Like, I
don't care? Like, it doesn't matter, you know, and that's to
me as, like, you need to explain to me why it matters. And so I
tend to be a little dogmatic about that on my responses,
which sort of ends a lot of that stuff, I think,
Arvid Kahl: Do you think you have enough or like sufficiently
calibrated tools to deal with these kinds of things? They've
already been in like, what's in it the whole open source
maintenance management tools that kind of Oh,
Josh Pigford: like, does does GitHub provide enough? No, they
don't. I think it's, you know, there's a lot of stuff that I
would love to see sort of built around the management of an open
source project. But it's, it's not that bad. It's just like,
Okay, well, there's a lot of people involved. And it's just
people management and ends up being more like the kind of
tools that you need to manage like a Discord server. I feel
like I need that on GitHub. But yeah,
Arvid Kahl: yeah. How's that? What's that looking like for
maybe like, how are you involving the community? Like on
GitHub, Discord, any other places? Or how are these things
interacting?
Josh Pigford: Mostly, it's, it's yes, Discord, GitHub, and
Twitter is kind of where everything happens. And, you
know, it's try trying to, you know, writing up documents about
how to contribute, being really responsive in discord when
people ask questions, or say they have trouble getting some
getting something up and running, like, okay, let's talk
through that, that gives us feedback over how we can make it
easier to get up and running with the platform. So I don't
know. It's mainly just being present and responsive.
Arvid Kahl: Yep, that makes sense. You've, you've talked
about just earlier, like funding with us. I think that's an
important part, because obviously, this is the bootstrap
founder podcast. And bootstrapping is technically non
funding activity. But I believe that you your funding approach
is kind of bootstrapper ish. I think we had this whole
conversation, or I guess the community had this conversation
when you sold parametrics. And everybody was calling you like a
bootstrapper? And he said, Actually no, brain guys, I will
look like why do we act like one? But you know, this funding?
Is there. How's that happening now with maybe what's what's the
plan for this?
Josh Pigford: Sure. So we back in 2021, if you'll recall, the
the landscape was very different. And people were just
throwing money at everything under the sun. So it was easy to
raise money. And we end up talking about the bootstrapper
sort of mentality. So we, we did not raise a traditional type of
VC round we did, we went the crowdfunding route using reg CF,
which sort of allows anyone to invest and not have to be
accredited. So we have, we have around 1300 investors, because
of the craft table, you know, as little as like $20 of people are
involved in. So that was the sort of impetus or the
origination of funding for us. So raised 1.4 ish million back
in 2021 2022. So that was that was the original end, like we
spent, the vast majority of that trying to get the maybe product
out the door and hired a team of at most are eight people, eight
full time people plus contractors. So there's a decent
number of people involved. And that was the most expensive sort
of route to go. But anyway, so essentially, we're running out
of money, shut all this stuff down, did a quick pivot, then
built a tool called detangle. That thing makes money or at
least isn't losing money. But then when we open sourced all
this stuff, again, there's a whole other world of people who
are interested in investing in open source projects, at least
commercial like commercially viable open source projects. And
so yeah, so in the past 10 days, we've raised another 1.1 and
some change million dollars. But we're like refocusing like,
okay, not going to VC typical grow at all cost route of
rehired to people from the previous maybe team and and like
that's essentially our overhead is that and so much larger focus
on like, building the very sustainable, profitable
business. And leaving it at that
Arvid Kahl: sounds like a con business to me like,
Josh Pigford: Well, that's the goal like it's the kind of thing
I talk about my sort of view of Maybe as the kind of thing that
you start using when you're like 18 and or 16, or whatever, like
you get your first job and you've got some money. You need
to figure out a budget it and all that stuff until you die and
you've gotten a state that you're like leaving to your kids
or something like that, right? And like all of the stuff that
happens in between and all the different ways that you manage
your finances. And so, with that in mind, we're like building a
company that needs to be around for the lifetime of its users.
So yeah, so that needs to be calm. It can't be, go, go, go go
go. We're like spending, you know, 1000s of dollars to
acquire a single customer and like we need VC money to prop up
our terrible customer acquisition costs. And now it's
like, okay, we're like building a very long play here.
Arvid Kahl: Is that also a choice that you made for
yourself? Because like post exit, a lot of founders kind of
switch, right? They switch from I need to, I need to oh, I might
or now I don't have to anymore, but I'm choosing to do things
intentionally. Was that baked into the fabric of Maybe?
Josh Pigford: So the thing that the Baremetrics acquisition sort
of allowed me to do is not need to do anything, which pros and
cons to that, for sure. However, there's, now not the need for
some or there's not the pull towards some sort of like, exit.
Like, it's okay if this thing takes a long time. It's fine,
you know. I haven't taken a dime from like a salary perspective
for maybe ever leaving from when we had all this funding a couple
years ago. So like, I can be all in on the Maybe stuff. And we
just see what happens. Like, it's like, we can take some like
a typical risks because I'm not having to like, this isn't my
job in the sense of like, this is how I'm supporting my family,
like, we're fine. So there's sort of different outcome needs,
I guess, pros and cons, though.
Arvid Kahl: Yeah, and let's maybe dive into the cons here as
well because everybody's going for the exit, going for the big
cash influx. But the time that comes after that has a couple of
challenges too. What you just said to me, I reminded me very
much of my own choices right now. The businesses I'm
building, they don't have to be profitable immediately, I would
like to, but they don't have to. I can definitely invest a lot of
you know, like, capital in it myself, having access to it and
just see it, you know, survive long enough to make money. It's
something that I heard somebody called this post economic state
of mind, right? A state of mind where you do not need to think
of your mortgage, payments, or whatever. You think about years
or decades, you don't think about next week or next month.
And that makes a lot of difference. But you were talking
about challenges of this state of mind of this time. What
challenges did you encounter after selling?
Josh Pigford: Well, I think the sort of challenges of not
needing to make money means that you also aren't necessarily
optimizing for it, or at least the speed of it. So I think it
can also be, you know, constraints sort of breed
creativity, right? And like, if you're trying to build something
that makes money, well, then like, you need it to need to
make money. And so there's less urgency with that. And again,
like, there's trade offs on all that stuff and but I think for
me, it's the con can be like, sort of, oh, we'll get around to
the money making part. Instead of like, we have to get around
to the money making part. So, I don't know, sometimes lighting a
fire under you is a good thing and other times, I don't know,
just depends. But I think for me, that's been the harder part
I think is I don't feel the urgency most of the time. And
sometimes that's good. Sometimes it's not. The inverse of that is
also true. So
Arvid Kahl: I relate to this super strongly, like, my life
often feels like, oh, I could be doing more. Or I could turn this
into and then some kind of monetization idea comes along,
but then I'm then like, no, I don't have to and I would rather
just be nice and kind to people and help them with stuff. And
then you know, money will come as a consequence of helping
people anyway. It's one of the core tenants of what I believe,
which is why I'm building in public and sharing everything
that I do anyway because I see that you know, helping other
people help themselves best way to do it. And you do the same
thing with what you're currently doing in a very cool way. Yeah,
I think it's definitely a challenge to still keep doing
stuff when you don't have to. Have you ever considered and
this is kind of a metaphysical question, but have you ever
considered what your enough is in terms of not necessarily
money because money, you know, scales infinitely, but in terms
of the contribution, like how much time you want to spend
doing things for other people compared to doing things for
yourself? You know, like, all this kind of oh, after I sell,
I'm gonna sit at a beach and drink like margaritas all day
kind of thinking. That's like, obviously, the one extreme. The
other extreme is, I'm working full time, like, all the time
doing new things. And I think most people like you and me,
we're somewhere in between, like, where is that line? Like,
have you ever consciously reflected on that?
Josh Pigford: So for me, it ends up being my core is this sort of
need to create something now, whether that's software, whether
that's like music or like woodworking or anything. That's
the pole. So at the end of the day, I'm sort of optimizing for
that. That's sort of where I get a lot of fulfillment from. But
that has a lot of different flavors. And, you know, it's
like, currently, I'm doing a lot with software. I mean, I've been
doing that for the better part of 20 plus years. And so it's an
easy way for me to get, like some sort of fulfillment, from a
creativity perspective. But I think that changes over time.
And that's like, a lot of that's based on life stuff, right? So
it's like my kids are older. I have one adult kid, couple of
kids in high school, like the sort of time and sort of
investment in that side of life is like, different now than it
was 10 years ago when they were little. And like, I think life
sort of, like always evolving regardless. And so for me, the
constant is just like, every day, I want to create something
and then that enables certain things, right? Something like a
big exit, gives me more freedom to do things with kids and for
us to have different experiences and that kind of thing. So I
don't know, it's a weird melting pot of things. But the way my
brain works is like, I have to make stuff in some form or
fashion.
Arvid Kahl: Yeah, that's so incredibly noticeable, like with
you in particular, like, I don't remember a time where you didn't
do something really interesting. And we think about detangle as a
thing of just recently, but also Laser Tweets and all these other
things like over the past, like Laser Tweets, you sold that too,
right? Like these things go come into your life and they leave
your life again, like you have a very high churn and the best
kind of sense, in terms of projects that you're working on.
Do you want to keep doing this forever? Like, that's also part
of this enough question for me. Is this just the state of being
that you always want to do?
Josh Pigford: Maybe, I mean, so I have this list of like, every
project that I've ever done on my website and it's I think I
was the other day was updating, it's like 70 projects or
something like that. And that's everything from just dumb. So I
start tracking that stuff in 2003. So that's 20 years of
making stuff. So like, I don't know that it's just a sort of,
it's not necessarily a fad for me, like I don't know that I'll
stop. Because that's been at least half of my life, at least
from a business perspective, I guess. Certainly, as a kid, I
was making all sorts stuff too. So I don't I see it changing.
But I feel like the hobby side of it may change a bit to the I
said something other day where it was like, I want to use
projects or I want to build stuff that like hundreds of
millions of people use but also want to go like live in a cabin
by myself and never talk to another human again. And I
genuinely feel that where, you know, is there a scenario one
day where, you know, my wife and I are often in the mountain
somewhere and like, away from civilization, maybe. I
personally would love that. My wife's not quite as like, anti
human as I can be. But I, you know, I think it morphs over
time, but as my interests change and I think to me, that sort of
the constant is that it has to be something sort of new for me.
I'll just get bored. And so there has to be some sort of
fresh way to approach it. Otherwise, I'll lose interest.
Arvid Kahl: Which makes this whole open source thing such a
smart idea, I feel. Right? Right?
Josh Pigford: And I think that's one of the motivations behind it
was like, well, why not? No one else has really done this. So
let's give it a try. That was the case with Baremetrics, where
like, we made our dashboard public for everybody to see. It
was early on before it was really making much money was and
I talked to other founders, the advice was like, no, don't like
put that out in public. Like, you're shooting yourself in the
foot with like competition and stuff. And I was like, well, I
don't know why not. Like, I like the experiment of it. And I sort
of feel that way with this open source stuff is I like the
experiment of what happens when you make a million dollars worth
of FinTech software, open source for anybody to use and then try
to build a business around it, you know.
Arvid Kahl: Yeah, that's very cool. I love that both of these
kinds of experiments are kind of transparency forward
experiments. Instead of just making things like even more
secretive and more secluded, you just opening up, right? And I
love that with Baremetrics. You kickstart I think in many ways,
the whole open dashboard thing that so many people still do to
this day, right? There is a time in every business is life where
it's beneficial to have it open. And then there is a time when it
becomes problematic when there's too much attention. But still
for that time, like building in public as well as a seasonal
activity, that is a wonderful thing that gets a lot of
goodwill, a lot of trust established in the community of
people. And that is always good. And I really like that that's
the outcome of this. So with Maybe being an open source
project that you will monetize through, like additional
services, what's the vision for this going forward? Like what
will make you stick with something like this for decades
to come when you're a person that always needs novelty?
Josh Pigford: Yeah, I think that it's understanding that software
hasn't ever finished. I mean, depends on what problem you're
solving. But I think having a very lofty sort of goal, that
where we want customers that will use the software for 60
years, like, if that's the goal, there's a lot of work to do to
sort of meet the needs of in the same way that you know, your own
personal finances are always changing, growing whatever or
not growing, which is its own problem to solve. And like, if
we can build products that help people for a lifetime, there's a
lot of interesting things to try to make that happen versus, you
know, some other more hyper specific tool set or something
like that. So I don't know, given the breadth of work to do
that sort of a never ending sort of thing to solve.
Arvid Kahl: Yeah, it's a field that will present you with not
only throughout the seasons of anybody's life that are also
changing, but even the economies of the future are going to
introduce new things, right? Like the whole bitcoins and
whatnot, like all the crypto stuff, that will be an
interesting challenge to integrate. And that will change
that will be flexible. Man, I'm so close to making a joke about
lifetime payments and lifetime prices here. And I don't really
know what the joke would be. But have you thought about
monetizing with that kind of stuff? Because obviously, when
you think about 60 years, like would you ever think about
selling access to a product for that?
Josh Pigford: I could see if Maybe was able to be a sort of
downloadable product that didn't need external data, yes. So the
problem here with finances depends on, a lot of times it
just needs external stuff. Even if you're manually inputting
data, there's still a lot of stuff around the value of
certain things. So like stock market data, for instance, like
if you've got investments will like we need the investment data
to tell you what the current value is of your investments.
And that is the reason, a lot of the reason at least to have a
subscription fee is like each account has costs for us, right?
And so, you know, as nice as it would be to sort of almost go
this somewhat altruistic route of like, let you have a one time
fee for it. The reality is that that's not super possible at the
moment. Maybe it will be in the future. I don't know.
Arvid Kahl: That's aptly named product, I guess, for that kind
of, you know, unspecific future. But I think that's kind of where
I'm getting with the whole one stuff where the base camp people
like the idea of like selling a product once having people self
hosted and running forever makes perfect sense if it's its own
internal, kind of isolated database and you just have, you
know, people chatting with each other and you keep it all on
your server. But the moment there are API integrations that
you only can provide, like if people can run it on their own
service, that's also fine. But if there's stuff that you need,
obviously subscription model makes sense. Yeah. And in many
ways, your definition of lifetime is a very refreshing
one. Because like most people would define lifetime as
lifetime of the product, right? Lifetime of however long they
want to run their servers. But for you, it really is the
lifetime of the customer. So I'm very much looking forward to
seeing you just go on this journey and build something
really, really cool in front of everybody with the help of
people who are interested in it. If people want to follow you on
this journey, both you personally, the product, the
company, where do you want them to go? Where do you want them to
see the journey, whether you want them to contribute? Put it
all out here.
Josh Pigford: Yeah, the easiest place is Twitter. So just
@Shpigford, that's where I talk too much. So you can go to
maybe.co, there's some links to that stuff that'll change a lot
over the coming weeks. But that sort of ends up being the
launching pad to not be behind on stuff. Anywhere else, I'll
send you and it'll change in the next week.
Yeah, that's right. Maybe tomorrow, who knows? Change is
the only constant, right?
That's for sure.
Arvid Kahl: Thank you so much for sharing all of this. I'm
super excited for you in this project that gets really really
cool not just to see that you're building something amazing that
I might find very useful for myself, just to see the just the
excitement and enthusiasm of people in the community that
over the last like, what 20 days or something has just exploded.
That is so so cool. So I'm really, really happy that you're
sharing this, that you're doing it. And thank you so much for
chatting about it on the show today. Thank you so much, Josh.
Josh Pigford: For sure. It's been a ton of fun chatting.
Thanks for having me.
Arvid Kahl: And that's it for today. I will now briefly thank
my sponsor acquire.com. Imagine this, you're a founder who's
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better than not doing anything. And acquire.com is free to list.
They've helped hundreds of founders already, just go check
it out at try.acquire.com/arvid, it's me and see for yourself if
this is the right option for you, your business at this time.
You might just want to wait a bit and see if it works out half
a year from now or a year from now. Just check it out. It's
always good to be in the know.
Thank you for listening to the Bootstrapped Founder today. I
really appreciate that. You can find me on Twitter @arvidkahl.
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