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Before this interview we thought John Saddington was a guy that built WordPress products with his team at 8Bit (we were also intrigued by his new Kickstarter campaign: Pressgram). What we didn’t realize is that John, at a young age, had worked his way up the corporate ladder at big companies like Fox and Dell. Today you’ll hear his story.
Show Notes
Before this interview we thought John Saddington was a guy that built WordPress products with his team at 8Bit (we were also intrigued by his new Kickstarter campaign: Pressgram). What we didn’t realize is that John, at a young age, had worked his way up the corporate ladder at big companies like Fox and Dell. Today you’ll hear his story.
Highlights
- “I realized that as an executive, you don’t get to code.”
- “It was difficult for me to reconcile my interests [in products] with my father’s [as a salary man]”
- The power of a start and end date for projects: “I give myself timelines for my side-projects: I’ll say if I don’t hit these metrics within 6 months, I’ll move on.”
- “Entrepreneurs do way too much due diligence. Just push ‘start’, jump in!”
Show notes
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Shout outs
- Shout out #1: Marc-Andre Cournoyer. Our fellow Canadian Marc-Andre Cournoyer is teaching classes at classes.codedinc.com. This is advanced training for developers on Rails, Node.js and other programming languages.
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Creators and Guests
What is Product People?
A podcast focused on great products and the people who make them
Before this interview, I thought John Savington was a guy that built WordPress products with his team at 8bit. What I didn't realize is that John, at a young age, had worked his way up the corporate ladder at big companies like Fox and Dell. Today you'll hear his story. If you have a web development team or a product team, you probably want to know where you're wasting time and how you can be more efficient. This is exactly what sprint.ly does.
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Speaker 1:Hey, I'm Justin.
Speaker 2:And I'm Kyle.
Speaker 3:And this is Product People, the podcast focused on great products and the people who make them.
Speaker 2:And today we have John Saddington on the show. And John is one of the founders of eight Bit and is working on a new Kickstarter for a product called Pressgram. So today we'll be chatting with him about, his background and basically the myriad things he's up to.
Speaker 3:So, hey, John, welcome to the show.
Speaker 4:Hey, thanks for having me.
Speaker 3:John, let's start with some background. Where are you from? Where'd you grow up? And how did you get started building products?
Speaker 4:Yeah, every great story has beginning. My beginning isn't too different but I grew up in Jersey. Actually I'm a twin so there was some competitive kind of beginnings from very early on.
Speaker 3:Oh yeah.
Speaker 4:And then I traveled extensively because my father moved around a lot for his job. He wasn't in the military but he was a corporate guy and worked in one business for thirty seven years I think and then retired about three or four years ago. Oh wow. But he was incredibly good at building product and leading teams and so company wanted to do that. But I started building software at a very early age as early really as I can remember at least conceptually and I remember having startup was actually in middle school.
Speaker 4:I created a small kind of web design company and then I got my first domain my freshman year in high school and then boot up my first Linux kind of Apache box on that year.
Speaker 3:So for us Canadians, what's the freshman year of high school again? What grade is that?
Speaker 4:Oh, that'll be ninth grade.
Speaker 3:So in the ninth grade, you started your own, was it a web development company?
Speaker 4:Yeah, it was actually primarily HTML but with Flash and so I was one of the earliest kind of adopters of Flash technology and in fact back I don't know how and what your audience is but for those who are familiar with Macromedia and Flash before was acquired by Adobe and even before Macromedia They used to have these kind of specialists kind of super user boards at macromedia.com and they had like tiers of support and it's all volunteer and I was a you know kind of a freshman ninth grader in high school you know maybe like 13 or something and I had like you know all the stars and all the stuff for like a sports teacher but primarily do a flash based websites action scripting stuff but so that was that was that was fun. So I started working and doing that and then I got employed by Fortune fifty not soon thereafter and so I was working at 14 as a kind of an engineer on the international e commerce system for Johnson and Johnson and Accu contact lenses so I started using my development skills to make money very early on and I really got a taste of corporate lifestyle and all that that entails and I quickly realized that that was something that I didn't want to do but I didn't know enough at the time to stop and just go pursue other things so I continued my corporate track Eventually I worked for some other large companies.
Speaker 4:I worked Dell as a senior engineer for them for a while and then I became an executive at Fox and News Corp when was 25 and that's really as far as I could go up the corporate and a large scale enterprise ladder before you know I wanted to blow my brains out.
Speaker 3:This is crazy.
Speaker 4:That's how I got started.
Speaker 3:So you were fully like from the tenth grade, you were working for big companies all the way up until you were 25?
Speaker 4:Yes, yes. And then actually I did a nonprofit, I was in technology leader for one of the largest nonprofit stateside for a year or so. I mean, I got two master's degrees all at the same time. There's a lot of this stuff, but that's how I got started in software development. It's been a ride, you know?
Speaker 3:Yeah. So you're 25, you're working for Fox? Yeah. And what happens next? Is this when you started doing your own stuff?
Speaker 4:I got fired. Got fired really quick. Mean, I was a senior engineer at Dell and I was overseeing their enterprise side of their application development for dell.com which is the largest e commerce website on the planet. Yeah. And then I was also building future state applications for Dell.
Speaker 4:So anything from internal blogging and communication applications to some of their kind of more user generated UCG stuff. And at the time, you know social media was blowing up. Even the fact that I use the word UCG, I don't feel like I hear that very often but it's kind of a given. And user generated content was huge and kind of we created the idea storm which was kind of like a DIG internal like DIG style application for Dell customers. Anyway, so Fox asked me, hey, you should come lead our technology division for Fox Entertainment Group which was actually was Fox Interactive Media.
Speaker 4:Okay. And oversee acquisition of small startups and then so kind of M and As and then build out the technology for the global kind of news corp. And at the time you know it a very attractive year because I was living in Austin I actually had kind of one or two very very small startups while I was at Dell and they allowed me to keep my house and live in Austin with my wife and my growing family and then travel to LA in Manhattan to office and to do work. And that was kind of fun except that was the first time I was like in executive and kind of executive management. And what I quickly realized was as an executive in a billion dollar company, you don't actually get to touch code.
Speaker 4:Like, don't know why, you know, I didn't really think through that very carefully. Yeah. And within the first two, three months, I was like, so when am I gonna get to touch the product? Like, oh no no no no, you don't actually touch the product, you're gonna hire engineers and then I was like, yeah, I did that, I got a great team but so when can I spend some time in kind of the nuts and bolts? You don't really do that here.
Speaker 4:Yeah. It's like what? And so I was like I really rebelled against that. So I started a video sharing technology that was actually in direct competition to some of the stuff that they were planning, but that wasn't public yet. Yeah.
Speaker 4:And anyway they fired me and they were just like, you can't do that. Was like, fine. Anyway, so that was probably the first time I really shared that story in length, but
Speaker 3:That's hilarious.
Speaker 4:I've been fired like a number of times. Don't get I don't work well with management I guess.
Speaker 3:Yeah, yeah. Sorry Kyle, you gonna say something?
Speaker 2:Well, was just going to say it's interesting that you've had this successful sort of executive career and you just made that comment, you didn't really get along well with management. But on the flip side, you've also been doing these really start up y type things. It's unusual to see somebody who's like that entrepreneurial spark to go so far, I guess, in the more corporate world so soon? Like how did you manage? Were you like a split personality almost?
Speaker 2:Were you kinda trying to do both at the same time or how did that work?
Speaker 4:I think it was because you know there are lot of factors and each of us have a very unique backstory and all the kind of nuances of what makes us us. But for me it was very difficult to reconcile my very early on interest in entrepreneurship and building products and then looking at my father who was a salaryman for thirty seven years for one you know fortune organization. It's like so you had this guy who worked right at a college at a co op or slash internship I guess and then became the in this chief executive of this fortune company. And it was very difficult for me to reconcile my interests with my father's. I wanted to really wanted to honor that that legacy and I tried as hard as I could to make it work.
Speaker 4:Mean every major career decision, every single career decision I've ever made, I've called him and asked him for his advice and just said, Hey dad, I'm just really confused. I don't know what I'm doing but this is the track that they have me on. I'm working my way through management really fast and the pay is great you know. Now we're looking at quarter million with incentives and bonuses and 30% performance rates you know and options and like that's what you did and but I really don't like it you know. So it's like this.
Speaker 4:So it's really tough and I think a lot of entrepreneurs you have to kind of go through that period of really kind of digging in and looking into who they are and then saying you know what, I can either follow my parents or my legacy or try something different.
Speaker 3:Yeah. So and after that, after you got fired from Fox, is that when eight Bit started?
Speaker 4:Actually, I took a break. We had, and we made some great money. Yeah. And so I started, I said, you know what, maybe this is the time where I just, I need to go back to school. And I'm like a lost soul, I mean, I'm like totally, I will try everything at least once.
Speaker 4:I was like, know what, I'd always wanted to go into ministry. I grew up in the church, my parents grew up in church, very religious and stuff like that.
Speaker 3:Okay.
Speaker 4:And so I said, you know what, I think we've got some savings and the heck with it, like why not we try this? And so enrolled at Dallas Seminary which we're in Austin and Dallas was about three hours north and so I enrolled in a Masters of Theology program there and started doing that and started working my graduate work. I finally graduated last fall This is seven years later with a double masters. So I had my two graduate groups finally. So I've been married to like that institution like almost as long as my wife.
Speaker 4:And then I got hired instantly as a technology leader at a very large non profit. So I thought wow, like maybe the direction of my entrepreneurship is in kind of the nonprofit NPO type organizations. Yeah. And so I worked for a large, one of the largest churches here in The US, Northpointe Ministries. I was a technology leader for them and all while taking my graduate work.
Speaker 4:And then also in addition to building these very small applications on the side, that lasted a little bit of time but nonprofit ministries like it's like it went from incredible corporate governance and bureaucracy to like the slowest like technologically astute type of culture ever. Yeah. Because you know religious organizations as good as they are, they're they're very slow to adopt. They're slower to adopt for different reasons than the enterprise. And so it's almost like I really valued that time.
Speaker 4:A lot of my mentors came out of there. I'm still very good friends with many of them. Actually hired one of my partners at eight bit to come work with me and then I left and then I told him that he should leave too. I lived in his basement for a while when we started up eight bit so you know that's kind of a crazy story but and so that was really good because I really experienced the inertia of bureaucracy and corporate governance. Yeah.
Speaker 4:Not the inertia of kind of culturally relevant or contextually relevant type of organizations. Yeah. So what what is really stopping technology to move forward in kind of the religious space or nonprofit space? Well, it's x y z x y z. So I really have got a good taste, a very well rounded taste of the major types of organizations.
Speaker 4:I really do value that time.
Speaker 3:Yeah. So all along you're building little projects on the side and
Speaker 4:I've actually built a little project and some large. I raised half a million dollars in Angel for communications app built on Rails. We went out to raise another $56,000,000 in an a and b round. I mean, so when I say little projects, I don't know if they were that small. Yeah.
Speaker 4:But it's like what the enterprise couldn't afford me was the freedom to actually build other projects and even experiment with businesses without being completely recommended and fired. When I worked at this nonprofit, I did incredible work for them, but I also had incredible freedom to even, you know, daylight like totally not moonlight but like literally work during the day on my other applications and no one really had an issue. They were actually very supportive of that. Yeah. So that was really cool.
Speaker 4:I could incubate some ideas very very casually. For sure my salary was like 20% of what I made when I was working at Fox and News Corp but my wife and I have never been expenders we stay very lean Yeah. And so it really, really did work out.
Speaker 3:Yeah and did any of those side projects go anywhere like as you were building them?
Speaker 4:Actually they did. I mean in 2,007 I launched a social networking application for adopted the adopted people group. I'm actually adopted Korean with my friend. Okay. And so built a social networking application for adopted in division two thousand and seven that was that grew very quickly and was acquired.
Speaker 4:The next year I launched a dating web service for World of Warcraft players. That was picked up by Kotaku and kind of that network. That was acquired within six months. The following year I created the first Twitter application for kind of Christians and nonprofits. That landed on TechCrunch in 2009 and was acquired.
Speaker 4:2010 I built communications applications right so Angel and Venture that was kind my first Angel and Venture round experience. That was acquired, I built some service side applications, built an advertising network in 2011.
Speaker 3:Man, so you've just been moving along this whole time. Building and selling stuff. 8bit seems to be, because that's your current company, right? That seems to be a little bit more is there a longer view with eight bit?
Speaker 4:Yes, there is and it only is because I discovered that my partners are also my best friends. And so it doesn't really matter what we built. We were bootstrapped. I did raise a round of capital for us. It's not very well known but I did raise a round of capital for us early last year.
Speaker 4:We didn't need it but it was really cool And it just kind of helped accelerate us to the next point. But these three guys, mean again one of them, first partner I moved my family with two of my daughters you know like right into their basement to kick start the company. Yeah. And now we're just we're best friends. So right now we're working on WordPress and we have a standard theme is our kind of our flagship product.
Speaker 4:We're working on a couple different products to be released this year. But that's a million dollar company. And it works, it's great but we have a hell of a time. I know Again, point all I'd say is when you find great people to work with, it almost doesn't matter what you build because you're gonna build great stuff anyway. I'm sitting here in my office downtown, we just moved in here about two three months ago and it's just me I'm in a 3,000 square foot facility in historic Downtown Atlanta and it's just me but my partners you know one guy I think he's at a coffee shop one of my partners in a coffee shop the other guy's hanging out with his wife and his kids and Tom is at the North hanging out with his daughter and it's just like, and there's total trust you know we're all doing great work, we're all working very hard today but when you have friends and you get to work with them and trust is the currency then it's very difficult for you to move on.
Speaker 4:It's incredibly difficult for you to move on.
Speaker 3:What, sorry go ahead Kyle.
Speaker 2:Well, was just, I had some more questions actually. Like this is kind of a few steps back but like, I thought it was really interesting that you, like your side projects, because we've talked a lot about side projects on this show before and usually side projects are not sort of the scale that you've talked about. So I'm curious to know, like for example, the one app you raised angel funding for, Like why, what led you to seek funding for a side project and how did you manage to convince investors to invest in something that was a side project rather than like your primary focus?
Speaker 4:Yeah, that's a great question. And what I've been asked a number a few times. For me, one of the best things that I've been able to always bring to my partners and my venture capital team is just straight up unadulterated honesty about my intentions, about what I see the roadmap to be, and just a 100% clarity. I take that philosophy on all my side projects. They have a begin date and they have an end date.
Speaker 4:And I don't vision cast beyond that because you guys have interviewed many vision casting people and know many people and even vision casting, there's no end to vision casting. The problem is it all sounds really really good. So when I experiment and build my application and here's probably a very kind of pragmatist look at it. I say I'm going to try this for six months and if shit then shit and then you move on. If I can achieve a certain level of metrics within those six months, I call that a success.
Speaker 4:It might not be financial, it might just be a product, it might just be kind of a marketing play, it might just be brand awareness, I don't know but I declare that and say this is what I'm going after. So then I can relieve myself of those applications and those side projects without a lot of emotional baggage. When I first created like the World of Warcraft dating website which was kind of like the soup back then 2000 I guess '8 you know eHarmony was really picking up. Plenty of fish had just like opened up and said you know it was like one guy and like two part time sys admins were making like 30,000,000 a month or something and it was just it was blowing up so I was just like well was a senior engineer at Dell at the time and I was building their enterprise app and I was like well, I'm just gonna try this and for six months I'm gonna build kind of a social network dating website and if it's six months it sucks I'm gonna close it But in six months if it reaches x amount of interest or users and maybe even some revenue, then I'm gonna start looking for a buyer because I'm not interest like and my legacy doesn't need to be about World of Warcraft and dating.
Speaker 4:Yeah. So for me to be very so clear in my own you know head and even in my heart then when I get to that six month period I can make very clear decisions about where the project should go and every single time I've said you know my goal is to build an incredibly attractive IP as quickly as I possibly can and then find a buyer who's willing to give me cash. And then so I can go do my next thing. And most entrepreneurs don't have that level of clarity or I haven't met very many. They can kind of look you in the face and just say, I'm in love with this application just for six months.
Speaker 4:It's contradictory. Like well if you love it then is that like eternal love and you might hear like yeah yeah yeah but not really because if you're a serial entrepreneur you're always thinking about the next thing. So I'd rather just come you know be very straight up about it. I went and raised this venture capital. I said here's what I need to do.
Speaker 4:There is an opportunity that exists in the nonprofit space for social communication. There's no enterprise grade especially really based on application ever created for this type of of market segment. I wanna enter it as quickly as possible. It could take nine months to build if I got the right team around me and we could kind of bootstrap it or I can build it in 12 I'm sorry, I can build it in weeks. I can build a MVP, a fully functional MVP in twelve weeks if I raise about half a million.
Speaker 4:I said I would rather do the twelve week stint instead of nine months and will you help me? And if we can reach those critical benchmarks within the first twelve, release our MVP, get incredible board, and then walk out the door in nine months with some offers to expand or buy out, then everyone's gonna be happy and no one's gonna be mystified if it does or doesn't happen. And investors, they're really open to that level of transparency. You know it sounds even weird saying it, you'd think that most people you know would be that transparent but I wanted to be very clear, like I'm looking for an exit here. I'm looking for exit quick so that I can bring a return on for you guys and I can go do something else because I'm gonna get bored.
Speaker 4:Anything that extends beyond about like twelve months, I'm bored. I don't want to lead you on to think that I'm gonna be interested in this product in month thirteen or fourteen. This really works for some of the people that I've been able to raise money from.
Speaker 3:This is so interesting. This is a very different because a lot of the people we interview are like one or two product people. Know like Jason Fried built Basecamp and he's basically stuck with Basecamp this whole time. You know, I think probably one of my problems is that I don't say even though I'm interested in building products like kind of long term, like building something and sticking with it, you know, I'll try things, but I won't have a start and end date and I won't have any kind of idea, like you said. So in six months, what do I expect to happen?
Speaker 3:What's going to be what's the benchmark that I have to hit? And I think that's actually really good advice to say, Let's put a time box around this and say, where are we gonna be? And if we're not there, then let's move on.
Speaker 4:Yeah, it's like, again it's just my opinion. Now I'm not as wealthy or I would say as successful as DHH and Jason Fried. So, that's awesome. But for me, the way that I've been designed, it works. And it's not to say that I'm not interested in building long term.
Speaker 4:8Bit is a long term company that I'm just I'm in love with because I found the right people to work with. But I will always be interested in building new products and I'm always interested in doing it and not wasting my time. Like I'll give you a perfect example. Like we just finished WordCamp which is kind of the local event for WordPress users and we, I chaired it, helped lead organize it and my company was a sponsor and we had our party here. We just finished that and we got so much response locally here in the Atlanta region for more education that we're like the heck with it we're gonna create our own kind of mini event.
Speaker 4:And my wife was an event coordinator in her previous life before she married me and she would have coordinated events for twenty thirty thousand people. I mean she was a mega event coordinator. Oh wow. And like it and that's extreme but it takes a long time in preparation to actually create you know a really decent well well kind of managed event. Mhmm.
Speaker 4:But for us it's like I take it just like I do startups. Alright guys, you know, when we sat out with our team, had a retrospective, we looked back at the WordCamp, we said we can do better. I said alright, let's put a date on the calendar and let's do it. This was like two weeks ago that Camp ended. We had an actual date in May for our event.
Speaker 4:It was barely over two months away or actually two months, it's actually closer than two months now. And it's like if we can't do it in in two months, like shame on us. There's no need to say okay we'll do it sometime in fall, put the damn date down, get everyone in line, get your marching orders and then go kick ass. If it sucks it sucks but like I just don't wanna waste my time and my team doesn't wanna waste their time and my wife who volunteered to help coordinate, I certainly don't want her to waste her time. And I just think far too many entrepreneurs do way too much due diligence instead of just hitting, you know, hitting you know, pressing start is what we say here at eight Bit.
Speaker 4:Just press start.
Speaker 3:Yeah. Press
Speaker 4:start. Jump in. No. Don't read the manual. Go die a couple times on the first level, and then you'll learn.
Speaker 1:That's all for part one with John Saddington. One thing we didn't get a chance to talk about, but we do discuss in part two, is John's campaign on Kickstarter. Go check it out at www.pressgr.am. That's Pressgram. You can also find John on Twitter at sadington.
Speaker 1:Now it's the time of the show when we do shout outs. This is a chance for you to advertise your project to our audience of product people, entrepreneurs, developers, and designers. My fellow Canadian, Marc Andre Cornier, is teaching classes at classes.codedinc.com. This is advanced training for developers on Rails, Node. Js, and other programming language.
Speaker 1:Visit classes.codedinc.com. That's c0dedinc.com. Do you want to be featured in the shout out section? The cost starts at $39 per episode and it's a great way to reach thousands of people. To purchase a shout out, you can go to productpeople.tv/shoutout.
Speaker 1:That's it for now. Follow us on Twitter at ProductPeopleTV, and don't forget to sign up for our newsletter, productpeople.tvnewsletter. We'll see you next time for part two with John Saddington.