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Have you been making excuses as to why you can't build your product, bootstrap your own business?
Show Notes
Part 2 of our conversation of my conversation with Ruben Gamez and how he outsourced the early development of Bidsketch.
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Notable quotes
“In the early days, I spent from $6-$10 an hour on programmers from Odesk. Nowadays, when I hire developers I pay in the $20’s. It’s ways easier to find someone of better quality, when you pay them in the $20-$30 range. Now both of the developers I have are in Argentina.”
“The developers I’m hiring now, from Odesk, are better than the developers I worked with the USA that were making 6 figures.”
“I treat my full-time outsourced developers the same way I would treat a normal employee.”
“By outsourcing, I was able to build Buildsketch in 4 months. Quick.”
Show notes
Creators and Guests
What is Product People?
A podcast focused on great products and the people who make them
Hey, product people. Have you been making excuses as to why you can't build your own product, boot strap your own business, or hire someone on oDesk? Well, you need to listen to this episode because Ruben Gomes is here to destroy all those objections. This is part two of my conversation with Ruben, and you're gonna get a lot out of it. First, let me thank our great sponsors.
Justin Jackson:If you are creating an application that needs charts for dashboard, Fusion Charts is the solution for you, trusted by developers around the world. They have a whole variety of interactive and animated charts with all sorts of flexibility. Their charts work across all platforms, PCs, Macs, iPads, iPhones, and you can download a free trial at fusioncharts.com. Sprintly, they have been here from the beginning. I am a huge advocate for these guys.
Justin Jackson:I use their product every day. It is the perfect way to manage the software development process especially if you are using agile or kanban methodologies check Sprint layout. You can try it for free by going to www.sprint.ly and once you sign up for a billing plan use my promotion code PRODUCTPEOPLETV2013 you'll get yourself 10% off. Now let's get back to part two with Ruben Gomes.
Ruben Gamez:Right. So as an example, a while back, I posted a job for, for help this person, for support person on oDesk. And some of the things that I was asking for upfront in the in the job posting, right, is, like, that they'd, have to answer support email in the morning, in the middle of the day, at night, late at night, right, at least three times a day, preferably a little bit more. On the weekends, I was asking for a lot. If I were to read that job posting, I'd say, forget that.
Ruben Gamez:I'm not going to do that. Again, I'd want them to be responsive, preferably, generally within like one hour or a couple of hours, they'd be able to get back to me most of the time. And I got back some really great, amazing people. I was surprised at quality of the people that I got back.
Justin Jackson:And why do you think, why did you so many quality people apply?
Ruben Gamez:I think that for jobs like that, they're generally easy. Right? All you need is a computer. You need to be able to do some research online, use Microsoft Word or Office. So those jobs can be super appealing to to a lot of people, work from home jobs that give them a lot of flexibility.
Ruben Gamez:They're they're willing to there are trade offs. Right? So they're willing to take that to be a little bit more responsive and maybe, you know, do a little work kind of odd hours or whatever. Yeah. It gives them a lot more flexibility on other things.
Justin Jackson:Yeah. And what's the kind of let's say for a developer, what's the average rate for someone on oDesk?
Ruben Gamez:So there is no average rate. It depends on, you know, like the country and even then. It's just like it's all over the place. Right? Yeah.
Ruben Gamez:I can tell you what I've paid in the early days when I was building BidSketch. I like I said, I didn't have a lot of money. I spent from, like, $6 an hour to 10 up to $10 an hour.
Justin Jackson:Wow. So super super low.
Ruben Gamez:Yeah, yeah, yeah, super. I average about 8. Nowadays, when I hire developers, I'm paying in the 20s.
Justin Jackson:And talk us through that. Why the difference?
Ruben Gamez:The quality it's way easier to find somebody that's of better quality, you know, paying them, like, in the twenties. Mhmm. And it's easier to find that's what I have to pay to find somebody that's in a closer time zone. Like, now, both of the developers that I have are in Argentina.
Justin Jackson:Okay. Yep.
Ruben Gamez:And that's what I wanted. So it's it's a little bit more expensive. That said, the quality is excellent. Like, in my old job where I worked, we were paying like, those developers were making close to, like, 6 figures a year. Right?
Ruben Gamez:Yeah. The developers that I'm working with now, they're getting paid, you know, in the twenties, and the ones that I've worked with before from Odesk and all that are better than those developers
Justin Jackson:in The
Ruben Gamez:US making close to 6 figures.
Justin Jackson:Wow. Because that's been the other kind of worry that a lot of people have is you know, that the quality won't be very good. You're saying for yourself, about $20 an hour from Argentina, you're getting really great quality people from there.
Ruben Gamez:Yeah, like 25, 26. Yeah, you have to think about whether or not it's great pay where they are, Not about whether or not it's great pay here in The US or in Canada, right?
Justin Jackson:Yeah. You're saying up to $26 an hour? Is that what you're saying?
Ruben Gamez:Yeah. One of them I started He actually requested to start off at 20 and said like, okay, let's, you know, after like a month, we'll go up a little bit. And then after another month, we'll go up a little bit. So now, I think they're both, it's been a while, so they're both, I think, at $27 an hour is what I'm paying them.
Justin Jackson:Gotcha. Gotcha. But still a lot lower than hiring someone in The United States.
Ruben Gamez:Right. Right.
Justin Jackson:That's interesting. And how would you describe your relationship with these people? Like, for example, these two developers in Argentina, like, what's your everyday kind of relationship with them?
Ruben Gamez:So one of them now I'm trying to work with developers that so one of them is full time. Right? The other one's part time.
Justin Jackson:Okay.
Ruben Gamez:I try to not work with part time developers, but the part time guy is really, really good. And, you know, so so I'm okay with that. Yeah. He was supposed to be, like, shorter term, but, you know, there's always stuff to do. Yeah.
Ruben Gamez:The one who's full time, he's actually in Ireland right now for a couple of months, but then he's coming back to Argentina. Generally, the way that it works is, you know, I'll jump on Skype. He'll be on there and, you know, then we start chatting. Right? And it's awesome for me.
Ruben Gamez:It's it was so different going from working with somebody that was in India or something like that, right? Where I couldn't really have these chats on Skype. Yeah. It was much harder because of the time zone difference to where now it's like instant, right? He's got a question, I answer it.
Ruben Gamez:You know, I have a question, he answers and it's, you know, it's great. I treat them like if especially, you know, this developer who's full time, like like he is a full time w two employee for me. Right? So, like, I I buy I buy him, an Audible subscription. Right?
Ruben Gamez:Yeah. Because I know he likes audio audiobooks. I buy him, subscriptions to other, like, a PEEP code and and stuff like that. Just little, you know, these little perks that I owe to somebody who's, you know, who I had hired as a W-two employee.
Justin Jackson:Yeah. So this is not like, you know, sometimes people in this space can feel like they're running a fake company. This is a real deal company you're running. You've got and even though you've hired these folks, you know, remotely, you still consider them to be your employees.
Ruben Gamez:Right. Right. So absolutely. I actually just hired my first W-two employee and she does basically most of the things that are not coding or design. Handles a lot of the support and I say customer, her positions like customer experience.
Ruben Gamez:She just did help with like actually did most of the customer development interviews with 20 companies. Oh, wow. Handled it great. And I found her through Craigslist, actually. She lives in Washington, so she's in The US.
Justin Jackson:Interesting. And and for the the developers, do you still use oDesk to manage them or are you just off oDesk now and you're using your own systems and process?
Ruben Gamez:For them, it's on oDesk.
Justin Jackson:Okay. So you're still the tool that allows you to kind of see what they're doing and
Ruben Gamez:Right.
Justin Jackson:Gotcha. Gotcha. Interesting. Okay. So this is really interesting And I think helpful for our audience, especially because there's a lot of people that are I think they think about that.
Justin Jackson:And there's so much about this that is overwhelming. Like, let's say you do finally get to something that you think has is a legitimate pain point and you have an idea of where you want to go, yeah, actually getting it built is the hard part. And what I see and I talk to a lot of people, people email me and things like that. And they'll say, well, I've been working on this for three years or six years and they're kind of just plotting along. How long did it take you once you started from scratch again to rebuild BidSketch?
Ruben Gamez:Got beta in like four months. Wow. So it went a lot faster. It really did. It's a huge, huge help.
Justin Jackson:Wow. Okay, well, let's in these kind of last minutes we have, let's talk a bit about marketing because that's what people are always interested to know. Like, how do you find people for this stuff? So how validate did the idea, first of all? Like, how did you you had a sense by observing at your own company that this was or with your buddy there that this was a need.
Justin Jackson:How did you know that more people would be interested in this?
Ruben Gamez:By that time, like I said, I was reading some blogs and marketing books. I knew that I wanted to to do something to to kind of measure demand. The best thing that that I needed to do at that point was just to go to the Google keyword tool and see if people were searching for for the product. Now people nobody was searching for, a web design proposal tool or Yeah. Proposal software because I was I was going niche with, you know, I was focusing on on the design niche.
Ruben Gamez:Right? Yeah. But people were searching for web design proposal templates, and, you know, web design contracts and stuff like that. And I and I knew I could put up landing pages and offer that for free. And the traffic was not it wasn't competitive.
Ruben Gamez:There wasn't a lot of it, but that was okay. Like, I just needed to capture a small amount of traffic. Right? Yeah. Convert it.
Ruben Gamez:And I felt that I can convince those people to sign up to a product once they knew, it existed. Right? I also saw that people were searching for, other topics like, so for blogging, I didn't have an audience. I didn't know anybody, anything like that. Right?
Ruben Gamez:So Mhmm. When you're starting from scratch like that, you can't just write posts, and, you know, have people appear and start reading and start sharing and all that. Right? Yeah. You need need to expose that to to an audience.
Ruben Gamez:The way that I did that was just using the keyword tool to sort of guess about what what they might be searching for. So, you know, I I would type in stuff like charge for web design, and then it would give me hints, right, about suggestions about what other what they were actually searching for and how many searches people were doing a month for that. Yeah. So then, you know, how to write your web design proposal, stuff like that, like a lot of how to posts.
Justin Jackson:And so you were basically and so was most of your traffic coming from, like, organic search results?
Ruben Gamez:Yeah. In in the early days, it was mostly that. Wow. Mostly that. So whether it was, you know, through those template pages or through those landing pages where I offered templates later on the contract or blog posts.
Ruben Gamez:Even the blog posts, they were all focused on keywords.
Justin Jackson:Wow. You're basically trying to get them to sign up for an email list. Is that right?
Ruben Gamez:Right. So I had the blog and then I had in front of the blog, if you just went to the domain, you had, you know, a really simple landing page where it had like two sentences or something like that, a bullet list of three items describing the product and then, an email sign up form.
Justin Jackson:And give us a sense of numbers, like when you started and what kind of traffic and what kind of sign ups were you seeing?
Ruben Gamez:I have a really bad memory, so I hope I'm close to what they were actually. But I think I looked this up a while ago. I think it was like in between 2,000 to 3,000 uniques a month. So it wasn't a lot.
Justin Jackson:Gotcha.
Ruben Gamez:But for me, was a lot. Right? Like, I mean, you know, I had no website, I had nothing. Right? So I put something up.
Ruben Gamez:I have zero visitors. Yeah. So I'm slowly of like, you know, one, two, three. Right? Then eventually get up to like 2,000 or 3,000 a month.
Ruben Gamez:That's, I felt like, you know, a huge amount of visitors.
Justin Jackson:Yeah, that's significant. I know a lot of bloggers that have been going for a long time and 2,000 visitors is a good month for them. It's especially interesting that you did this through basically SEO, like keywords, targeting different keywords. I haven't heard of that approach before.
Ruben Gamez:Yeah. That was the only way that I knew of at the time. So I didn't know of like hacker news or anything like that back then. And I mean, you know, because a lot of people with what they do nowadays is even back then is basically write a post, try and get it on Hacker News Yep. And, you know, then maybe get some of that traffic to sign to the email list.
Ruben Gamez:Yeah. And I probably would have tried some of that, but I think I would have still stuck with SEO because, like, the eight the hack news route or, you know, whatever it is, it just fuels I don't know. It's like with SEO, especially if you're going after keywords that aren't competitive Mhmm. You can be a lot more sure about the results that you're going to get. Right?
Ruben Gamez:Mhmm. It's it feels more like a gamble to to to go the hacker news route. Yeah. Know it works really well for some people and if it works, you know, if if you're the type of person that can make that work, I think it's great because you can get some, you know, some you know, as long as the product is aligned with the audience and all that stuff. Right?
Justin Jackson:Yeah.
Ruben Gamez:I think it can work out pretty well. But, I kind of always just like the approach of getting people that are searching for something, right? Like, you know the intent, right? You know their mindset. They want something, you just give it to them and try to get them to sign up on the list.
Justin Jackson:Yeah. Yeah. Well, this is probably a good time to talk about I noticed that I think on Twitter we were talking about this, that you had said that you're not really into this kind of personality marketing and branding, that you would rather have kind of your company be the focus. Can you maybe just go into that a little bit?
Ruben Gamez:Yeah. So like I see this really big trend nowadays and it's basically where people are doing a lot of work to position themselves as an authority, right? As an expert. And so that just goes against like, my personality is just very different from that. I don't like all the attention.
Ruben Gamez:I don't like seeking attention. I'd rather my product get the attention or my product get famous, right, if you want to say that. I don't want to be famous. I don't want to be known for anything. I want my company and my product to be known.
Ruben Gamez:That's the way that I look at it. Because I don't want the worth of my company directly tied to me, meaning that if I leave or if I'm not around or if I'm not answering emails or doing whatever, that people don't sign up, that my company is not worth anything because of it.
Justin Jackson:Yeah. I think that's a valid point. Especially when we were chatting about this before. I was thinking about that. And it was that exactly what you just said that, you know, if it's very personality driven and this actually happened to I think it was Ryan Carson was talking about this when he sold Future of Web Apps, his conference business.
Justin Jackson:That almost derailed the whole negotiation because they were worried that that business was too tied to him. Right? It was called Carsonified. It was really a lot about him. So that's interesting that you're kind of setting this up so that BidSketch is the focus and, you know, you're involved in BidSketch, you're the founder and all that, but you kind of play second fiddle to the product itself.
Ruben Gamez:Right. And it's not so much that when somebody signs up, they get a welcome email and it's from me, right? So it's not that everything's from the Bitsketch team or or something like that, right, to where it feels like you're dealing with Google or a really big company. So it's not anything like that. It's just about the amount of effort that I put into making myself into an authority or making myself famous or whatever, you know, however you want to put that.
Ruben Gamez:I don't I don't do that. So, like, if you look at my blog, now nowadays, I have several people contributing to the blog, and it's not like, I could have hired several writers to ghostwrite and then put everything under my name if I wanted to outsource it. Right? Or I'm not writing it myself or whatever. I don't do that.
Ruben Gamez:I have people other people contributing. It's really high quality content, you know, for the product blog, and everybody writes under their own name. Right? And, I don't have a single writer doing it either because I don't want, you know, associated with that one single person either. Right?
Ruben Gamez:Yeah. So people talk about it as, you know, when they say they like the blog, they'll say they like the Bidsketch blog. Right? They don't say they like my blog or this other person's blog.
Justin Jackson:Exactly. Yeah, I really like that. I think that's refreshing, especially for me. Like, I actually I naturally like attention. So, you know, that whole side definitely appeals to me.
Justin Jackson:But I can see the wisdom in what you're doing. And I also meet people that are maybe similar to you in the sense that they don't want the tension, they don't want to play that whole game.
Ruben Gamez:Yeah. That's the other thing that I see too is that because a lot of people are talking about it and doing it nowadays, it seems like they are anyways, people that I follow and see speak and all that. I think it's great for people that want that. You know, it's a great approach. But I also now I'm starting to see people that that probably shouldn't be trying to do that, that don't really want that trying it.
Justin Jackson:Yeah.
Ruben Gamez:You know what I mean?
Justin Jackson:Yeah.
Ruben Gamez:And it's not really the best approach for them. Yeah. Like, it's, you know, it's it's you you really have to use what you have to your advantage, right? Stack the chips in your favor as much as possible.
Justin Jackson:Yeah. Well, I also I mean, there's a kind of a good forewarning there too if you're thinking about, you know, taking a vacation or selling your company or anything like that. There is something about if you've kind of built up this system that's all dependent on you and focused on you, that's a lot of pressure as well.
Ruben Gamez:Right. Right. Yeah. Like, deliberately, as I've built Bidsketched, I've done it like, I know I can make more money if I do, you know, like, more go for enterprise sales, do high touch stuff, whatever. I've like, through every step of the way, I've made sure to build something that is low maintenance, doesn't require me to always be there, doesn't require a lot of support, all this stuff.
Ruben Gamez:Right? Mhmm. So I put all these constraints in place, and I've grown maybe slower, but it's still been pretty good. You know? How does that I'm okay with it because, you know, I don't I'm not tied to my business in that way and I don't have just another job again.
Justin Jackson:Yeah. How does that look practically? Like when you say that, it sounds a little bit like, you know, what people joke about lifestyle, business and things like that.
Ruben Gamez:Right.
Justin Jackson:But what does that look like for you now? I mean, you talked when we started this conversation, you talked about working your butt off three hours every night on top of your work. What does it look like now for you as you're kind of managing this team and a product that's already going?
Ruben Gamez:So I'll talk a little bit about what it was like a few months ago. I just took like four months off, right? Wow. We had our first son, so he's not like nine months now. But during that period of time, was just like, okay, I'm going to take some time off.
Ruben Gamez:And basically during that time, it was like five minutes of like five, ten minutes of checking email and then that's it, a day. Right? So there wasn't much going on. There wasn't much going on on the development side either. Right?
Ruben Gamez:Yeah. Like, I wasn't working with two developers. You know? I I knew I was going into that, so I kind of, like, talked to the developer who's part time, only one person at that point time, and let him know what I was going to do, and that he was going to work less and on longer term projects that were going to need less feedback from me. So then, you know, so that was pretty easy.
Ruben Gamez:On the support side, I had somebody doing support, and then, you know, it would just require just, like, very few emails from me to on a daily basis, like one email, if that, on a daily basis to to manage. So that was really easy, during that that point. Then once once I was ready to get to work again, right, because I had all these ideas and things that I wanted to do and grow faster and all that stuff Yeah. Then I hired, like, the full time developer and so now I have, like, the full time customer experience person. Right?
Ruben Gamez:So I now have like a small team. I was really concerned about that. I kind of put that off for a while and I talked to a lot of people because I think I told some I don't remember who I told this to, but I said, I don't I don't want to hire an employee, like a full time person, because it'll I feel like I need to be, I'm going to need to be, like, at work starting at nine and then right and leave at five or whatever, right? Yeah. If they don't see me working all the time, then how how will they feel?
Ruben Gamez:Yeah. So that was a really big concern, to me. But, after talking to a few people, was just I I realized that, it a lot of it depends on the type of people that you hire and the expectations that you set up front.
Justin Jackson:Yeah.
Ruben Gamez:So now that I'm wanting to work a lot, like, I'll wake up, you know, and not get to work until like ten, maybe eleven, generally about 10:10 in the morning. I'll work for about a couple of hours. Then I'll take, like, a long lunch, get back to work for another hour or two. Lately, I've been working a little bit more, so maybe another two or three hours. So I I rarely I don't really work, like, a full eight hour days.
Ruben Gamez:It's more like five to six hours. Yeah. And that's a lot. Like that's the most I've worked in a long time. And then that's it.
Justin Jackson:Wow. So your life really changed. You put in a lot of hard hours at the beginning, but now it sounds like you have a lot of flexibility.
Ruben Gamez:Oh, yeah, absolutely. And I think a lot of it too was picking, you know, like picking the right type of business, right?
Justin Jackson:Yeah, it sounds like you were really mindful about that. And I think, you know, that's interesting because it is easy to start something and not think about what you're kind of building, like what kind of support it's going to require, what kind of investment and all that stuff. But it sounds like you were pretty mindful about all that.
Ruben Gamez:Yeah, that was a really big deal to me, you know, early on. And even as I've developed and grown the product and, I'm doing a lot of stuff to move up the average revenue per customer, to make it more valuable to people and all this stuff, I'm always thinking about that and how it's going to impact my personal life. Right?
Justin Jackson:Yeah. Interesting. Well, before we go, I'm just thinking about the product people audience. And, you know, there's a lot of these folks that haven't built and sold anything before. What would you say?
Justin Jackson:What should be their first couple steps?
Ruben Gamez:So, yeah, there's so much there. I would say that, like, I don't know, one of the things that I just see most people not doing is taking action. So I see a lot of people, you know, reading and listening to podcasts and stuff like that, which is great. But then they're not they don't seem to be doing much with that. Or they maybe come up with things that are too big.
Ruben Gamez:Right? So I would say start with something really small and do some take some sort of action, towards making that real. Right? So, like, for example, with BitSketch, my and I remember having this conversation with somebody at my old job who's asking me, what are your plans with it? Mhmm.
Ruben Gamez:It was never anything like, okay, well, it's going to be able to replace my salary and I'm going to quit and all this stuff. Right?
Justin Jackson:Yeah. It was just,
Ruben Gamez:well, I'm going to build something kinda small and focused, and I wanna learn how to make money and, you know, how to market a little bit. And and then, you know, maybe I'll maybe it's making a couple thousand dollars a month, you know, if I can get it up there. Mhmm. I'll do something else. I'll launch something maybe bigger than that.
Ruben Gamez:Right? So, it just made it a lot easier for me to think of it in that way because it wasn't like this huge thing, right, that was going to be a failure unless it, you know, hits certain numbers and grew at a certain pace or anything like that.
Justin Jackson:Exactly. I think that's really good advice. Let's let's leave it there. You can find Ruben on Twitter. He's EarthlingWorks.
Justin Jackson:And you can check out BidSketch. It's bidsketch.com. And anything else that anywhere else people can find you on the Web?
Ruben Gamez:No, I think that's going be it.
Justin Jackson:That's it. And the blog that he was talking about is bidsketch.com/blog. Thanks so much for your time, Ruben.
Ruben Gamez:Well, thanks.
Justin Jackson:Thanks so much to Ruben Gamez for being on the show. You can follow me, Justin, on Twitter at MI Justin. And you can also check out our sponsors at Sprintly. Thank them on Twitter and fusioncharts.com. This month, the Product People Podcast celebrates its one year anniversary.
Justin Jackson:Over this year, I've produced 50 episodes, interviewed over 25 guests, people like Jason Fried, DHH, Jason Kalakanis, Dan Martell, Amy Hoy, so many great guests. I appreciate every one of them. And we've had over a 100,000 downloads. I've showed up every week, and so have you. And I really appreciate you being a listener.
Justin Jackson:At the end of the month, I'm planning on taking a break. The show won't go away permanently, but I'm definitely going to be stopping producing episodes for a while. So enjoy the next couple episodes we have until the October. And then keep us in your feed because you never know when we might pop up again. Thanks again so much for listening.
Justin Jackson:I'll see you next week.