Product People

Can you build a healthy software business when you don’t know how to code? Hiten Shah is on the show today. He and his co-founder Neil Patel, have built two successful SaaS apps: CrazyEgg, and Kissmetrics.

Today you’ll hear Hiten’s secret to being a successful entrepreneur.

Show Notes

Can you build a healthy software business when you don’t know how to code? Hiten Shah is on the show today. He and his co-founder Neil Patel, have built two successful SaaS apps: CrazyEgg, and Kissmetrics. Today you’ll hear Hiten’s secret to being a successful entrepreneur.

Highlights
  • “I don’t know how to ‘feel’ like an entrepreneur. To me entrepreneurship isn’t a feeling.”
  • “When you create something, out of nothing, and somebody consumes it and loves it – that’s entrepreneurship.”
  • “The people that get stuck… they don’t bother to figure out what it is (that they can make) that people will love.”
  • “To be an entrepreneur you have to build things, and people have to love them.”
  • “Almost any problem you see in a company boils down to people and product.”
  • “It’s hard to manufacture genuine customer appreciation.”
  • “As the creators of things, the people part is huge. You need to ask: ‘how do you humanize a product’?”
  • “CrazyEgg was 1 of 10 things we tried; and it was the one that resonated the most with people.”
Show notes
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Shout outs

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Creators and Guests

Host
Justin Jackson
⚡ Bootstrapping, podcasting, calm companies, business ethics. Co-founder of Transistor.fm

What is Product People?

A podcast focused on great products and the people who make them

Speaker 1:

Hey, do you think it's possible to build a healthy software business when you don't know how to code? Heathen Shaw is on the show today. He and his co founder, Neil Patel, have built two successful SaaS apps, Crazy Egg and Kissmetrics. Today, you'll hear Heaton's secret to being a successful entrepreneur. I just finished creating a new account on sprint.ly

Speaker 2:

for a new product project I'm working on. The reason is that whenever

Speaker 1:

I enter tasks and user stories in sprint.ly, I actually get things done. In sprint.ly, when you add a task, it's completely focused on your customer. Basically, what outcome does the customer want to achieve? You and your team can try Sprintly for free by going to www.sprint.ly.

Speaker 2:

Hey, this is Justin Jackson and this show is called Product People. It's a podcast focused on great products and the people who make them. And today I'm delighted to be joined by Shaw of Kissmetrics. Hey, Heaton. How's it going?

Speaker 3:

Really good.

Speaker 2:

Right on. Right on. What what's a what's a regular Thursday look like for you?

Speaker 3:

That's a good question. Today I happen to be in the office. I'm either usually meeting with other entrepreneurs, meeting with customers, meeting with somebody on my team. And usually if I'm meeting with someone on my team, it has something to do with product. So that's probably why I'm talking to you today.

Speaker 3:

That's pretty much about it. So today is a combination of all that. Have every other Thursday, we have all all hands meeting at Kissmetrics, so that'll be happening in a couple hours after this. So yeah, that's it.

Speaker 2:

Right on. And and you're you're one of the the founders of Kissmetrics. Are are you the CEO right now?

Speaker 3:

I was the CEO, and we had a CEO join us late last year, and technically now my title is President.

Speaker 2:

Right on, right on. Well, let's start by quickly describing your product. What is Kissmetrics?

Speaker 3:

You know, sometimes I describe it as we do analytic stuff. We've been in business about five years. About four years ago, we came up with this idea of, you know, after a few pivots, as they say, this idea that analytics really should be about understanding people and your actual users.

Speaker 2:

Mhmm.

Speaker 3:

And so we basically built a system that allows you to actually analyze your customers. And we started it by having a funnel report that had a lot of, if I do say so myself, a lot of innovation at the time at the end of 'nine that nobody else was really doing. We've And just grown it since then. We specifically target marketers. We also have a whole bunch of product people using us as well in terms of end users.

Speaker 3:

Yeah. And

Speaker 2:

so let's start by getting to know a little bit more about you and kind of your backstory. Where'd you grow up? When did you get into computers? And when did you start getting interested in building products?

Speaker 3:

Yeah. I was actually born in 1981, so I'll go all the way back for you.

Speaker 2:

Right on.

Speaker 3:

By the time I was six years old, my dad told me I should be an entrepreneur. He's a physician, he's an anesthesiologist. Yeah. And by the time I was eight, I think partly to fuel that, he got me my first computer, which was I think, like, a August.

Speaker 2:

Okay.

Speaker 3:

So I'm from the 80868088286386, penny m one, two, whatever, all the way up.

Speaker 2:

Yeah. I

Speaker 3:

had a computer since I was eight years old. So I've had a computer for twenty three, twenty four years. So it's hitting on almost twenty five years and I grew up with a computer.

Speaker 2:

Yeah. What was it about being six years old? Because your dad was a professional. Why did he look at you as a six year old and say you should be an entrepreneur?

Speaker 3:

I think it has something to do with the values he tried to instill in me, but a lot of it just had to do with, you know, there's a lot of facets to that, of course, but one is control of your own destiny. So full control over, you know, as much as you can possibly control in your professional and personal life. So I think that's a big deal for him. That's a lesson I learned from him. I think another thing for him is potential ability to impact the world.

Speaker 3:

And so if you can make your own time, so to speak, you're able to impact the world in whatever way you want and have almost unlimited impact, so to speak. And And so I think that was important to him. Then lastly is probably less spiritual or less philosophical and more practical in today's life, is simply he went to work and he still goes to work and he makes money and he has some form of an hour hourly salary. Right? Yeah.

Speaker 3:

You can always back into that. My world isn't like that. So I think he he really unknowingly probably in a way taught me a lot about leverage and how to leverage my own time so that I can do the most valuable things that I can possibly do. And the way you do that, which is another similar lesson that he taught me, he's very good at this actually, is how do I find very how do you find very talented people to do things better than you and get them and enable them to do those things and that should be your job. And I think only an entrepreneur can truly do that is kind of probably the way I this is all my interpretation of what he how he sort of influenced me.

Speaker 3:

I don't think it was none of those things did he deliberately say to me in that way. Mhmm. He just showed he just I've learned by his example. He runs health health fairs, health camps all over the world. Yeah.

Speaker 3:

And we're all free completely, 100% all the way and for anybody whether you have health insurance or not, it doesn't matter. And all the way from blood tests to mammograms to EKGs to even like he had his first US surgery, three surgeries in America late last year or last year and used to do those, or he still does all around the world, but in America that's a very difficult thing to pull off. That was a big accomplishment for

Speaker 2:

And where did you grow up?

Speaker 3:

Did you

Speaker 2:

grow up in California?

Speaker 3:

So I was actually born in Zambia, Africa.

Speaker 2:

Okay.

Speaker 3:

And then my family and I moved to New York when I was five and then moved to Southern California when I was 12. And then I grew up basically in Southern California, teenager onwards, and then went to UC Berkeley for college, stayed actually five and a half years and then moved back to LA, started my first business which was a sort of consulting marketing agency, and then moved back up here in San Francisco Bay Area in about 'seven.

Speaker 2:

Okay. Growing up, were you always into building things? Were you making and selling things growing up as a kid or when did you start getting interested in building products?

Speaker 3:

Yes, so like a lot of kids of that era, I loved my Legos and erector sets and all that stuff. I wouldn't say I was crazy about building all that, I was probably more crazy about taking things apart and not being able to put them back to the end. Yeah. So I used to do I did that with our phone for some reason. Like I don't know why, and it never got into this like in terms of as a career or potential professional education, but I just like circuit boards and stuff like that, but I never really like built stuff with them too much.

Speaker 3:

I just like to take shit apart and see what happens. And then I got really into like I I built my own computers and stuff like that, but, you know, I I would build them not even for like gaming or any of that. Was just more curiosity, pure. Pure curiosity more than anything else. I I didn't even wanna understand I'm sort of odd like that.

Speaker 3:

Didn't even wanna understand how it all worked. Yeah. But I wanted to understand how it all worked. Meaning, didn't wanna read something to tell me. I didn't care about, you know, voltage.

Speaker 3:

I didn't care about the theories behind it. I just wanted to feel feel it, do it, and sort of figure it out. And I didn't like reading instructions.

Speaker 2:

Yeah. And so you're building your machines and stuff like that. Can you remember the first time you ever felt like an entrepreneur?

Speaker 3:

Yeah, that's a good question. I never thought of that question, believe it or not. No, I can't because it's not a feeling for me.

Speaker 2:

Yeah. What is it? How would you describe it?

Speaker 3:

It's me.

Speaker 2:

It's just who you are?

Speaker 3:

Yeah. It's not a feeling. I don't know how to feel like an entrepreneur. I know how to feel like myself. Yeah.

Speaker 3:

Well, asked me how am I doing Mhmm. When we first talked before you started recording or before we started, I said, No complaints. And that's the feeling if you want to get into a feeling, it's like, to me, it's a feeling of never having any complaints. That's the feeling of being an entrepreneur to me. Yeah.

Speaker 3:

I were to peg it, and I felt that all my life.

Speaker 2:

When was the first time you sold something? Can you remember when you had your first sale?

Speaker 3:

Sure. It was during high school, early in high school when I, and this is what I remember, I'm sure there was something before that, but when I sold car parts so I could fix up my own car.

Speaker 1:

Okay.

Speaker 3:

So for me, you know, it's an interesting question the way you asked it, right, when I first sold something. To me, being an entrepreneur or whatever, you you wanna call it, like, to me, the definition isn't about selling things, which might be different from my co founder Neil, but for me it's actually building something out of nothing. Okay. Creating. Creating is so much more to me what I define as entrepreneurship than anything else.

Speaker 2:

There's other people that create things too. Artists, there's people that would say, I'm a creator. What do you think is the difference between an entrepreneur and someone like an artist?

Speaker 3:

Maybe there isn't any difference. Like, we all need to create things, you know, and for the artist it's creating for their own pleasure, but they created something from nothing. Blank slate, you know?

Speaker 2:

Mhmm.

Speaker 3:

And made it up. I think that, you know and even the word entrepreneur, a lot of my friends don't like it. But you know, it is what it is. But like, I don't have an opinion. I just think that's an easy way to define what we think an entrepreneur is or whatever that is.

Speaker 3:

I think she's a builder builder of stuff that didn't exist before. That's that's a definition for me. So an artist could be that, know, anybody. You bake it, you create bread, right? You take these ingredients, you put it in a bread machine or maybe you don't, maybe you're more pure than that, and you put it in the oven and you bake it and then people eat it and taste good and that's your product, you created it.

Speaker 3:

That's an entrepreneur in some way shape or form because they had to put all this stuff together, put it in, you know, do all the little things to make it happen, bake it, and then people consumed it.

Speaker 2:

And so for you, what is the definition of a good entrepreneur?

Speaker 3:

They create things that people liked They create things that people love.

Speaker 2:

So using your example of bread, if you've gone through all the process to create the bread and then you deliver it and people consume it and enjoy it, would that be a successful entrepreneur?

Speaker 3:

Yeah, that would be a successful entrepreneurial endeavor because they created it from nothing. They and it was with the intention of somebody consuming it. And someone consumed it successfully and enjoyed it or loved it, and that's important. That doesn't mean that you don't create all these things and they fail, you know, and that's bad or anything, it's just that I wouldn't say that was successful. In that case, made the bread and it tasted bad and nobody liked it.

Speaker 3:

Then we just gotta try again.

Speaker 2:

Mhmm. What do you think it is about, now that we're kind of on this tangent we'll get back to your story in a sec what do you think it is about I think there's a lot of people that want to be entrepreneurs. There's a lot of people that want to build products. But there's definitely this line. There's some people that can't get past they never bake the bread.

Speaker 2:

Might bake the bread but then they never deliver it to any customers. Other people, they seem to just get stuck along the way, people that want to be entrepreneurs. What's the part that they trip up on the most?

Speaker 3:

I don't know. I I think every entrepreneur, everybody trying to say something is different, right? And if I were to just pick on one thing, I mean, I'd say that they don't bother to figure out Yeah. I guess I would say that they don't bother to figure out what it is that they should be creating that people will love. Mhmm.

Speaker 3:

Like that that's actually probably where everyone gets where most entrepreneurs get stuck, which is if I were to point one thing out, it's like you have to build things and people have to love them or you don't have a business and you actually haven't built anything worthy of being built. Now that could just be that, you know, someone you cook dinner for for for for, you know, your spouse and they love it. And that's an endeavor that worked out and that was great. But like if you don't know what he or she likes or how to make it so that it's something they love, whether it's just your company or whatever, that experience, that whole process I would say is, you know, an analogy for products on the web today or whatever would be that you're really trying to figure that piece out of like, what is it that I can create and and why would someone why is someone gonna love it? And you know, that that boils down to to me, it's product.

Speaker 3:

Honestly to me, something I've been thinking about a lot is just this idea that I think almost any problem you see in a company usually boils down the people obviously in the company and what they're doing, why they're doing it, etcetera. But really, a business problem usually boils down if taking out the people usually boils down to the product.

Speaker 2:

And going back to your story now, you think of a time where you built, like what was the first time you built something that somebody loved? And maybe while you're thinking about that too, can you think of also some times where you built something and for whatever reason people didn't like it?

Speaker 3:

Yeah, mean, that goes back to my answer. I mean, honestly, either of those, I can't really remember. The reason why is I've built so many things. I don't even know this is the first thing I've built. I don't even remember.

Speaker 3:

Like, I can't even tell you. It's been it's been about ten years on the Internet. So on the Internet, you know, doing business on the Internet, I don't even remember. Yeah. And and my memory is generally pretty foggy, so so that's part of the problem, especially further back it goes.

Speaker 3:

But, you know, I I can I can tell you I can tell you my moments of joy, and they have a lot to do with the feedback loop of just knowing that what I've done was appreciated? And I think that's one of the things that's actually hard to manufacture. The fact that you do something and it's appreciated by, let's say, your customer. So for example, I'll it around and say, you know, the time when I I I sort of felt joy of what what I built was kind of weird, but it's like we we we were working on Crazy Egg, which is a software product we still own. It's self funded and it basically shows people you know, the the tagline for it is basically see where people click Yeah.

Speaker 3:

And it's really on your web pages. And, you know, we built it really early and at some point, the folks at thirty seven signals got wind of it. And this is when they've always been popular, but they were idols of mine at the time. And people I looked up to because they built software products and were successful doing it and they created Ruby on Rails at the time. Crazy Egg was built on Ruby on Rails and they did a blog post about Crazy Egg and how much they loved it and showed screenshots of their heat maps and that was pretty awesome.

Speaker 3:

And you think that just the feeling of that blog post and people I respect kind of of writing about it made me happy. But really what made me happier was the fact that, and this is personal, but was the fact that in the comments, we obviously have at that time there was a competitor that was doing something a little bit different around mouse movements and recording them called Clicktail. That's all they did at the time, and we got compared to them back then. Somebody basically put me as a pro, like me, Keaton, as the pro versus a con of going with Crazy Egg. And the reason they did that is at that time, I was responding to all support requests and commenting on all the blogs that Ever wrote about us and all that kind of stuff.

Speaker 3:

So that actually is the time when like I felt really good cause my efforts were appreciated. And those were my personal efforts. So it wasn't just the product because I felt like I do always have to build a really good product or, you know, it shouldn't be, you know, doing what I'm doing. Yeah. But it was really the feeling of that sort of, know, my efforts were not going to waste and people noticed.

Speaker 2:

Yeah. Well, that brings up an interesting idea and you've kind of alluded to this, but this idea of people and product, and they kind of both merge together in terms of someone's experience. So in the case of Crazy Egg, you had a product that had some utility and hopefully had a good UI and everything else. But this person noticed you as a person, as a part of that experience. Do you think that's fairly important to have both, this idea of actual people being a part of the experience?

Speaker 3:

Yeah. I think that's very important, especially as the creator or creators of things. The people aspect is huge and probably one of the most important things because you created it. How do you I guess another way to put it is how do you humanize a product? Mhmm.

Speaker 3:

You humanize a product by sharing and communicating that we built it and it's built.

Speaker 2:

Yeah. And I'm actually thinking about, you know, because I think a lot of people miss this. There's this idea that we could build just some software and some code and a design and then kind of leave that and that we could personally separate ourselves from that and just let the machine work without any of our involvement. But that doesn't sound like it's been your experience. It sounds like to have a successful company, for you, it's meant that you have to be personally involved, that you have to build relationships, that you have to be actually reaching out and connecting with customers.

Speaker 2:

Is that right?

Speaker 3:

Yeah, absolutely.

Speaker 2:

Maybe this is a good time to talk about you and Neil, because Neil was your co founder with Crazy Egg, right?

Speaker 3:

Yeah, all the businesses I've started, Neil and I have started together on the internet.

Speaker 2:

Okay, so Neil Patel, tell me how you met him and how you guys ended up building your first business together.

Speaker 3:

Yeah, So I've known him since he was 11 and I was 15. Okay. And I'm actually married to his sister, so he's my brother-in-law.

Speaker 2:

Okay.

Speaker 3:

Basically in 02/2003, I was getting out of college and he was getting into college. Mhmm. And he had one customer paying him $3,500 a month for SEO. Okay. And I was like, oh, that's cool.

Speaker 3:

I don't know that much about the Internet like you do about marketing and stuff like that, but I know how to use a computer really well, better than most people. And so I think I understand business. I had a bunch of offline businesses in college. Mhmm. And so, you know, I had freedom.

Speaker 3:

Let's just put it that way. I bought freedom in college because I just didn't have to work for many years if I didn't want to. And so and actually at that time I moved back home just because there's nothing better to do. Yep. And I was living at home, gonna get married to his sister, and we just decided to start the consulting company doing basically at the beginning SEO for other companies.

Speaker 2:

And so you guys started this company together and he was just in college. How did that go actually? How did the consulting company go?

Speaker 3:

It was great. I mean, we just started growing it and started making money. I think we just realized early on that we didn't wanna be in the services business in the long run. Mhmm. And so and neither of us were technical or are technical technically, I guess.

Speaker 3:

I fake it, he doesn't try to. And so, you know, we just started hiring designers and developers to try to build our own stuff as well as stuff for our customers. We never really did an official development shop or anything like that, But we definitely did a lot of design work and stuff like that. That really got I think that really brought out my personal passion for building good products and great products and wanting to keep trying to do that. So we just spent all of our money, literally all of it.

Speaker 3:

We were both living at home, so it wasn't really we didn't have that many expenses or anything. Yeah. Thanks to our parents. And so we just were able to have the freedom to learn by spending our money in that way, by hiring people and try to build different things.

Speaker 2:

Interesting. Is that that's how Crazy Egg was created?

Speaker 3:

Yeah, it was one of about 10 things we tried and it was the one that ended up resonating most with people. We did a lot of things that now are sort of more common to do like create an early access list and stuff like that and market it by, you know, writing and and and sort of getting involved in certain communities and stuff like that. So all the stuff that's much easier to do now and kind of obvious. We we actually did on that one compared to the other stuff we did. Yeah.

Speaker 3:

And it worked and it started growing.

Speaker 2:

And talk about, so launch, how many people did you launch Crazy Egg to?

Speaker 3:

So we had an email list of about 23,000 people. We had a few thousand people using it very early when it was pretty ghetto and and what you would call MVP today that was built actually pretty fast in a couple months.

Speaker 2:

Okay.

Speaker 3:

That was pretty fast. And, yeah, we we basically just blasted the list. The day we launched, we got we got on date, which drove a lot of sign ups and traffic and, you know, originally we had a free plan, that product doesn't have a free plan anymore. And that all just started driving the initial growth and and and conversion and stuff like that. And from day one, was a paid product.

Speaker 3:

We also are probably one of the first companies to do a table with tiered pricing and pop out one of the price points.

Speaker 2:

Okay.

Speaker 3:

Yep. So and then everyone else started doing it, including 37 signals, that's something else prior to that. Like, you could even still type in like crazy egg pricing table and get a a link from 2007 where someone tried to copy your pricing table. It it wrote all the code on how to do it. Like, this is like back in the day when that stuff just wasn't that easy.

Speaker 3:

I just pulled up that article and it still exists. Pretty hilarious. Yeah. And it becomes really slick actually at the time that we don't do anymore where when you click the price point, it would shift to the left and then the sign up form would appear. So little little things like that, know, we always, you know I mean, to me that's that's product in a lot of ways, but we we came up with really cool stuff like that.

Speaker 3:

We had some awesome designers we were working with at the time and yeah.

Speaker 2:

I think we'll circle back in the second part of the show to that idea of having a list of 23,000 and building that kind of audience. One thing that's interesting that we've been talking about a lot lately is there's a lot of people that are trying to build things by themselves. And you and Neil have built, like you said, almost everything together. Was that something that you'd planned? Was that something you realized that you guys together were stronger as a pair than you would be just trying to build something on your own?

Speaker 3:

We're very complimentary at this point. He's really, really into sales and marketing, and I'm really really into product and engineering. Mhmm. And so we just complement each other and we both crossover quite a bit as well on both of those things as well. So yeah.

Speaker 3:

I mean, it just sort of evolved over time. We've been working together ten years now, so we have a pretty good flow that we figured out over that period of time.

Speaker 2:

Do you think it's easier for people to actually start something and ship it when there's two of you as opposed to just one person working in their parents' basement?

Speaker 3:

That's interesting. Just like with most things in life, I think it depends. And I just say that because I've seen both work. Yeah. Whole bunch of my friends have have been single founders.

Speaker 3:

Like, just single one founder, not no co founder. And I mean, I think it's better when there's two people. In general, you have somebody to bounce stuff off, but then it can complicate things as well because now you got two brains you gotta deal with. Right? Yeah.

Speaker 3:

But, yeah, it's all relative. If you're able to do all the stuff yourself and it just happens faster that way and that's your way, that's great. But one thing to think about is as you scale something, you do end up having to have other people help you. Yeah.

Speaker 2:

And what were some of the lessons you learned as you were building Crazy Egg in terms of putting together a good team? What were some things that you kind of learned along the way?

Speaker 3:

I think the big thing the big thing we learned with Crazy Egg is simply you you can you can build you can build successful companies without having to write any code yourself, which in today's world is probably somewhat controversial. As long as you're able to figure out how to work with those people that are able to write code and design. I mean, all intents and purposes, I've always been the product person for all the things that, you know, I've built with Neil. Mhmm. And so it's my job to make sure, you know one one thing I like to say is I can out Google anyone, including our engineers.

Speaker 3:

So that's a helpful skill. Yeah. Helped that, you know, we were into SEO and stuff like that early on because I you know, also I love I love finding information that's useful to me. Mhmm. And so yeah, I can usually find something faster than anyone else as well.

Speaker 3:

Part of it is just a memory for those type of things, like a visual memory and a sort of alphabetical memory, I guess, in a way. Mhmm. And then I'm not gonna use a search engine. So I think I think I think for me, that's probably the biggest takeaway, which is like and it's counterintuitive today. That being said, I I I know how to edit code to the point where it can be very dangerous.

Speaker 3:

Mhmm. But I don't know how to write code from scratch personally at the moment. Except maybe some sort of PHP code just because I've spent too much time in WordPress. Yeah. But yeah, that's sort of, I guess, biggest lesson which might be counterintuitive to a lot of people.

Speaker 2:

Yeah. Well, think that's great. I mean, there's a lot of people out there that would say they love technology, but for whatever reason they wouldn't describe themselves as a designer or a developer. And it's nice actually to have those examples of people that kind of fit outside of the designer developer kind of molds. There are some people that love technology and are still building products.

Speaker 3:

Right. Yeah. I mean, it's totally possible. It's just you have to learn on the job and you have to basically be able to speak to engineers and designers without sort of seeming completely ignorant.

Speaker 2:

Yeah. And so what led to the creation of Kissmetrics?

Speaker 3:

Yeah. Mean, it was pretty simple. Like, we we had Crazy Ex and we understood how that business worked and we were basically building a second product that was, you know, the purpose of it, the goal of it was to take on a basically a bigger opportunity. And and the way we describe it is there's at that time there was Omniture which was targeting really large companies and Google Analytics which was free targeting everybody, and there wasn't really a brand or a business in the middle, and so that's what that's what our goal with Kissmetrics was, which is can we go in there and build a product that's right in the middle between those two that's very valuable and useful to companies.

Speaker 2:

Yeah. And so you started Kissmetrics in 02/2008, right? Right. And for Kissmetrics, you raised capital. How much did you raise?

Speaker 3:

With Kissmetrics, the first round we raised about a million dollars.

Speaker 2:

Okay. And was because you'd bootstrapped Crazy Egg. Right?

Speaker 3:

Yeah. Self funded. Yeah.

Speaker 2:

Okay. And so why did you decide to raise venture capital with Kissmetrics?

Speaker 3:

Some of the folks that we pitched Crazy Egg to, which we never raised money for, and, you know, it went funny just because it was low price points and, you know, people barely understood how that those businesses scaled, now it's sort of more common. So we didn't raise money from those folks, and we ended up, you know, having this bigger idea with Kissmetrics that they felt was more of a venture fundable business, so we you know, they were willing to write us a check, so that's one reason. Another reason is Crazy Nate was doing great and it was gonna grow, but Neil and I have always like found a way to sort of unspoken, but it's been more deliberate, you know, over time to basically learned by doing and optimized for learning over money or anything else. We really believe that experience is really what we really like. Driven by more experience, more learning, more knowledge, more information, more ability to do new things that we don't know how to do.

Speaker 3:

Don't think either of us fears the unknown at all at this point especially or has any fear of anything, to be honest, especially in business. So, you know, we just optimize for, okay, what does venture capital feel like? What what can we do if we actually had money upfront versus having to fund everything ourselves?

Speaker 2:

And you know, a lot of people talk about startups and especially the amount of, you know, there's obviously a lot of money that's required or can be required. But the other side of that is people always say that it takes an enormous amount of time and energy. Has that proven true for you guys as well? Like does it really take as much time and energy as people say?

Speaker 3:

It's a good question. It depends if you how deliberate you are about your goals.

Speaker 2:

Mhmm.

Speaker 3:

Like if your goal is to build the biggest business possible as fast as possible, yeah. It probably takes that kind of energy so that you're just hammering all the time and trying to get things done. That being said, there's probably ways to grow a business without having to by not thinking of it that way and almost doing the opposite, which is what's the least amount of time I can spend to have the most, make the most money or have the most impact or get the most customers? So it just really depends on your thinking and your goals.

Speaker 2:

And we talked a little bit about this before the show, but you're a family man. How many kids do you have?

Speaker 3:

I just have one kid. He's three years old now.

Speaker 2:

Okay. So you have this young family. And how have you balanced this startup life, which some people can say can take your whole life if you let it, with having a family and being a dad to your son?

Speaker 3:

Yeah, I mean, for me, as I was growing up, one, my dad told me to be an entrepreneur. Two, he highly suggested and recommended that I get married early and that I have a kid early. And so my short quick answer is, you know, marry well, so to speak. Yeah. Marry people that understands you and and and get to know them early.

Speaker 3:

And so my wife and I started dating when we were 15. And so that's probably my secret weapon is her when it comes to that.

Speaker 2:

Yeah.

Speaker 3:

She's awesome. She also she actually Neil and I don't work on Crazy Egg. She runs the whole company.

Speaker 2:

Okay.

Speaker 3:

As of right now, and she also is at home with the kid. And we don't have an office for Crazy Egg and very few people work on it full time. And so that's probably the secret weapon. Now that's probably because just because her and I have an understanding that was developed over about sixteen, seventeen years now. Because we grew up together essentially and kind of developed our own sort of way of doing things together.

Speaker 3:

And and have been through a ton of stuff obviously that many years. Mhmm. And so, yeah, I think that's the key for me. And then on top of that, it's like just you know, the one the one other trick I would say is like, if you're an entrepreneur typically, even when you're at home, you're always thinking about things related to what you're doing, your business, things you're involved in and stuff like that. Mhmm.

Speaker 3:

And that's great, that's fine, but when I'm at home, I do I do my best to be present and at home. Doesn't mean I'm not checking my phone, don't get me wrong. My email's like I don't I don't know how to check email only like three times a day or anything. Yeah. But my point is, when I'm doing something with my family, I'm there 1000%.

Speaker 3:

And that's probably a trick that I've learned over time, which is like, I'm just there a thousand percent. And that means that like, when they meet me or when I'm hanging out with my kid, I'm there. Right? And my kid knows I'm there and, you know, I'm paying attention.

Speaker 1:

And a big thanks to Heaton for being on the show. He's back next week to talk specific tactics on marketing your business, so stay tuned for that.

Speaker 2:

Let's do some shout outs, shall we? First shout out is from John Davis

Speaker 1:

of doihavesomething.com. John says, Google AdWords can be a good way

Speaker 2:

to drive traffic to a smoke test.

Speaker 1:

I am a PPC analyst offering to help lean start ups for free. With customer segment and value proposition for startup idea, I will create a PPC campaign and email it to them. So to check that out, go to doihavesomething.com. Next up, I'm giving myself a shout out. I'm writing a book called Product People Secrets.

Speaker 1:

You can find out more by going to productpeople.tvbook. Next up, hover.com/productpeople. Register a domain with hover.com Use the promo code productpeople, all one word, to get 10% off your order. That's productpeople, all one word, at hover.com. If you want to be featured in the shout out section, it starts at $39 and

Speaker 2:

you can check that out at

Speaker 1:

productpeople.tvshoutout. We will see you next week with part two with Heaton Shaw. Thanks for listening.