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Welcome to Joy of Building, where we go beyond building products & businesses to building lives that deeply transform both ourselves and those around us. Through powerful stories, actionable strategies, and personal insights, we explore how to overcome limiting beliefs and create a life aligned with your true passions. Whether you’re at a crossroads or ready for a breakthrough, join us to unlock your full potential and live with purpose and joy. Tune in, embrace change, and take that bold leap toward the life you've always wanted!
I think building a startup is such a, an easy, not an easy, but it's, to me, it doesn't feel like a risky bet at all. There are other things in life that are way more riskier. Even if, if, even if your product fails or something that you did fails, even let's say you raised money and then your plot your, your startup blew up and, you know, now you're back at 0, the fact that you've done that work to get your product from, like, 0, completely from scratch, raising money, and then failing, you actually come out ahead of 99% of other developers that are out there. That have never done this thing. Anytime you have a project that you built out and it failed, you actually come out just by the virtue of living through it, your skill set, your mentality, your charisma, your, your branded brand comes out ahead of everybody else that didn't actually try at all.
Hello. Hello. I would like to personally welcome you to the very first episode of the joy of building podcasts. I can't tell you how extremely excited I am to have you here. So ever since I was laid off from a tech job in the midst of pandemic in 2020, I've been building a lot of things.
And initially, it was simply because I wanted to build things to try to make enough money to sustain myself. But during the process, I discover something deeper and larger. That even when I built something that turned out to be a complete dud, I noticed that I still experience a lot of childlike joy and a subtle inner transformation, and that is what I call the joy of building. And I can't think of a better person interview as my first guest, as my friend, Sue Paul Sahini, or Souq Souk is one of the co founders of a startup called Injit, a platform that is simplifying SEO for folks. To me, Soux is someone who truly embodies the builder spirit.
In the past 8 years, he has built and shipped over 30 products. So in this episode, we'll talk about how his journey as a founder in Toronto started with a failure. How he approached learning and iterating from his mistakes, why he thinks that building a startup is not a risky bet. And finally, why he thinks SEO. Is a really beautiful thing.
I'd love to hear your thoughts as you listen to this episode. You can find me on Twitter or Instagram at Aceowtow tag me. Let me know your thoughts. If you're here on YouTube, please don't forget to hit subscribe if you haven't already. If you have, please leave a comment below, and that's not for me.
Let's dive in.
Yeah. I so I was born in India. I came to Canada about 7, 8 years ago right after I did, my grade 12 in India. And basically how engineering works in India is you have an exam, which is a nationalized exam called IIT, is It's kind of like the the medical exam that you have, MCAT. So everyone does it.
And based on the rank that you get, that's how you get to pick a college. Right? So college based on your rank, we'll take you in. But those exams are very hard. I was in a really good student.
I I tried my best, but I couldn't get anywhere close. So here was in grade 12 I did that exam. I prepped for it. So students prepped for it, for, like, 2 or 3 years just to get, you know, just to be able to pass that and and get a good rank I didn't get a great rank. It wasn't horrible.
But then the problem that became when I wanted to go to a college I couldn't get in anywhere, because all the good ones have been taken taken up. And so I didn't have any other choice. I turned to my mom and I said, mom, I really wanna be an engineer. I wanna do something, like, cool. I just don't wanna be, you know, just going to school just for the hell of it.
So is there something I can do? And so I've already had through some different circumstances. I already actually had a citizenship to Canada. I just wasn't here. And I I the whole summer, I tried to convince my mom and dad to be like, let me just go.
Let me just go see what what happens there? Like, I I'll I'll do everything or and anything because I know money is a big problem. And so loan behold, they agreed. I came to Canada, and they told me to I have to do a grade 12 again. And I was like, that's a price I have to pay then I then, you know, fine.
And so that's where I did grade 12 and then did by York University and went for school and got into IBM and so on and so forth. It was a it was a very valid investment was I'm pretty grateful for it.
Yeah. That's amazing, man. I mean, there's 2 things I wanna ask about that. One is, you know, when you didn't do that well in a test, which which, I can imagine as being, really difficult. And there's there must be a part of you that felt, obviously, very dis disappointed.
I can imagine when they get emotions, like, I don't know, shame and feeling that to self worth. First of all, how were you able to still be almost like confident enough to be like, hey. Even though this state test tells me I'm clinical bad at this, but I wanna do this. I believe I can do this, or I still really wanna do it. What Where did that perseverance come from?
Yeah. You know, I I think thinking back, it's It probably was just knowing that so the IT exam, by the way, is comprised of 3 things. It compares of chemistry, physics, and math. Though that's what you're tested on. And just to my mind, it just didn't relate why if I was good at all these three things that I would be able to build a startup Like, I would be able to build, some sort of softer product.
It just didn't hit my hit hit with me. And so if I didn't get into this exam, that doesn't mean that I'm bad at doing these things. It just means that they're testing me something that's, like, complete different. And even if the if it was, the fact is I'm not good enough for this test. Right?
So I have to do other things to get to the place that I wanna be at, because every other lane is kinda close to me. So I have no choice, but to persevere. And plus because I already had this route, it's coming to Canada is, like, a very difficult task. And I already had come that process with me, So I knew, if I just tried it, it wouldn't be worse than where I was right now. And so I think that kind of, like, motivated me to keep going.
Wow. Yeah. I love that. Love that you were able to kind of zoom out and not let those metrics of for the test we're we're we're engaging you on and relating that to some kind of that that ultimate skill set that you were trying to build and and and aspire to, right, the type of person you inspired. I think that speaks to a lot of, I don't know, a lot of just vision for what you wanna do and and, you know, look look at you now.
It it's just really awesome. The second part to that question was I could imagine that little kid who had to that That must have been a pretty big pitch, right, saying, hey. I still wanna do this. I wanna spend more money, and I want you to believe in me, and I wanna move to somewhere completely. What what was that pitch like?
Like, how yeah.
I remember it was it wasn't anything, like, great. It was like a single pitch. It was a lot of, a lot of groveling. I think that was that was that was a big part of it. And the other thing was just kinda my confidence of being like, okay.
Mom, I know it will cost, let's say, 10 k a semester, right, and they're just kinda like doing the math backwards of, like, how I would make that 10 k to make it worth your while. Like, oh, I wouldn't cause even more problems for us. Like, doing those calculations and kind of being like, this is what I can do every day. I can work, like, 8 out $8 an hour. I can, you know, I can, like, there's there's a way, where I can actually do this.
And I think she believed me enough. And you know what? Maybe maybe she was more like, let's just give it a shot. Right? What could go wrong?
He comes back. And we never have to go through this again, you know, the problem sort of solves itself. So I'm I'm very grateful for my parents to be able to give me this opportunity as well. Because I can almost understand, you know, because we actually had spent money in a college. So I actually did go to a college for a very little while for, like, I think a month or 2, and I just immediately knew this wasn't it for me.
So we had already spent money on a college as well. And so part of my pitch was I will actually go to the college, tell them that, you know, I don't wanna be here anymore. Get a refund and then use that money. And so one of my one of my first steps was actually going to the dean of the college with, like, kind of like an application being like, why I don't wanna be here. And he actually I I'm assuming a lot of people a lot of people come come through his door with a similar pitch.
He was very receptive, and he did say that you can take part of the refund. So all those three things combined, I think it made it a little bit the the the luck the part of the thing was luck as well. I think all those things combined, kinda, in my mom's head, it was like, you know what? It's worth a shot.
Yeah. Wow. Definitely shout out to your parents for well, giving you that that that shot and and hearing hearing that need. I would just want to try things out. Right?
You were also just, like, wanted to experiment to shoot that shot. And I love that. How how it turned out. So I also wanna ask because I saw it on your resume that and I was very intrigued about it, which was, tell me about your experience as a security guard for a very brief brief period in your life.
Yeah. Yeah. I was I was instrumental in my first jobs, that I got. I think I somewhere I went around So the same summer I came to Canada, I was hell bent on getting a job. I was in grade 12.
Didn't have any skills to know, like, the resume is a very, pretty new thing as well for me. So I was going around the mall kind of giving up my, my resume, and there weren't any, like, takers. So I heard that security guard was a big thing in in in Toronto, so you can actually get our license. So you need a license after doing a test. And, then the way it works is you just register for our security guard company.
And anytime they you know, any event was going on, they will need a ton of security guards at one time. So you'll get called and you can kinda kinda get worked that way. And so there's a so I worked couple different places. I worked a couple of different malls in in Toronto. Yeah.
But the most noticeable one or notable one was I I I spent a night at the Facebook headquarters in Toronto. Yeah. Yeah. I I was doing a security, position overnight. So there was nobody there, and the headquarters was completely empty.
Wow.
There was I I think they had come just sort of, like, moved their location somewhere else, and you could see sort of the remnants of, you know, people being there and innovation being done. Yeah. So I could I was just walking around being like, oh, man, there's like a wall of, like, everybody's names and, like, different, like, things that have been done here. And I just tried to take that in. And I remember thinking, man, it'd be so cool if I actually was working here, not a security government as a regular employee,
Wow.
But that was, I I I it kinda put me in my head of like, oh, you know what? I am in this building, technically. I just now need to be an employee, which should be a a smaller deal. So I ended up, like, the the next couple of jobs that apply to met out of Facebook was always the top one.
Wow. That's so cool how that security guard job put, you know, excellent for you in the actually a tech office. And I can imagine, well, how to felt. Right? But also, like, allows you to kind of visualize it.
You're like, I'm gonna stay in that seat someday. You know, I'm gonna be doing whatever kind of coating. I'm gonna it's not it's like a a a leap, but it's not that far, right, be able to, like, comprehend that in your brain.
Exactly. I think visualization or visualizing kind of, you know, even even some, like, So if you were building an app, right, and you can visualize, oh, okay. This will be used by the entire world. It it can technically, but in your head, you can't tell it. Let's say if you go to, let's say, Italy and you see a person on their phone kind of using your app, that's mind blowing.
So Yeah. So when you look when you visualize something, your brain kind of connects the dots in between of, like, how that would happen. Even if it's obvious, it's a powerful thing. And I think over my career, over my lifetime, I've tried doing the visualization thing. Facebook, the the security guard thing being the very important one that I still remember.
So I I always encourage people to do that.
Definitely. I love that. I love that note too. And I I I myself do that a lot as a product manager, and I started to combine that with with my what's in my sense of observation, right, because visualization, you're imagining the the workflow when they click on it, how to do it, which finger they use. Right?
But yeah. I remember because I live in New York City, and I see people using, I don't know, scratch the phones a lot on the subway. And I would just love seeing, like, woah, how do you interact with your phone and try to combine 2 elements, come up the more, let's say, pre predictable visualization of how that behavior looks. But for you, you mentioned about how you're able to kind of take that into building some of your products, right, or even thinking about this little feature or this little I know you also like to be very, thoughtful intention about your design. How has that visualization shaped kind of those things you implement?
How how do you usually process that?
Yeah. That's I think the best product managers or product designers have a very specific person in their head that's using their software. So the way we do it right now is we have a a we're lucky enough to have a few customers, and most of them are super fans. So whenever we make team decisions on a design feature or just a feature in general, we think, okay. How would this person, this specific person that we know in our life use this thing.
Right? And so what we can say is, oh, you know, he's, twenty five years old. So he probably doesn't use my space, for example. You know what I mean? And so, like, he probably wouldn't think that way.
And so by having a very specific persona and, like, a living person, that you know, Decisions specifically product decisions can be very easily vetted. Yes or no. Versus if you were to just say, Let's put this feature out. Someone in the world who will like it, which is kinda true, but that it just there's so much to unpack. It's so much different so many different, like, avenues you can go down.
And now you're building each feature for a different kind of person in the world. Versus the one that you're serving today and that you can actually name. So that's been the way I've it actually simplifies your prog decision very quickly. It's because, like, does this person like would like would it would it like it or not? Yes.
Okay. Let's go. No. They probably wouldn't. Let's do something else.
Yeah. Amazing. I mean, the fact that you're able to, like, take pride that you have some profants is is such a good feeling. Right? It it means that, like, while you have, like, a feedback loop that you can really trust and really help with that process you should describe.
Right? How How did you find these super fans? Like, how because I know in in your building journey, you have talked a little bit about, like, just lowering the imported some selling, right, getting that we've got an early validation of product market fit, but just be able to get that signal. For engine, how how did you guys go about getting your first super fans and also yeah, what were some of the most positive, either encouragement or testimonials that you heard that just, I don't know, that you're keeping your best, that it really warms your heart and and and inspires to kinda wake up every day.
Yeah. Funny enough. We just got a testimonial last night. From one of our super fans, and I was looking at it. And it's kinda surreal to see somebody speaks so highly of your work.
I I I personally can't handle it. So so I think it's a very personal thing, but it it really feels like you're delivering value when somebody puts in the work to say that back to you because even saying even though it might seem like, you know, just a text, it takes real intention behind, the person saying it. Plus, because they have to believe it, and for them to believe it, they need to see it working. So if you check a lot of those boxes, then you get the feedback, then you get the testimonial. It's really kind of a receipt for the work that you've done, you know, 2 months ago, 1 month ago.
The way we got our first ten customers was actually building in public on Twitter. So initially, I was so I've been a developer for a long, long time, and I've been building for a long, long time as well. One of our biggest problems was I could always build, just never be able to market or sell. And this is a very common problem for all developer founders, I think. You know what?
The most majority of of of the people I've spoken to, that is their biggest problem because it just doesn't come naturally to us. Right?
Yeah.
And so I was trying to figure out a way to solve this problem of my own And I ended up just tweeting about it on Twitter just continuously for a while. And lo and behold, that's where we got a couple of, like, 4 or 5 were initial sort of customers that took a look at the product and, some decided to pay, some didn't, but that was our initial kind of breakthrough of, like, me just sharing what I'm building and people being like, oh, you know what? I think I can use it. Which is I think of if you're looking for if you're like a early product builder and a dev founder, that is the way to get your customers I wouldn't recommend kind of doing, you know, there's other things, but I think that's the most potent one. But now My cofounder is the one that, has all these relationships with marketing founders and, you know, tech startups in Toronto.
So he so now he does most of the heavy lifting, which I'm very grateful for.
That's that's so cool. And you talked about, like, that that moment you realized that, you know, being the kind of builder who wants to well, be a little scrappy, but also get a lot of feedback like that idea of, like, building public. It's it's like a it's a really hard shift Right? It's like a pretty humble lesson, but it it takes almost like a really, like, somebody click in your head. So when was it that you decided?
Like, hey. Instead of always just spending time, you know, building, you know, being being my own computer and and just building products based on end and not talking about it, What was that moment that clicked for you? What and why did you start talking about this, even this early iteration of building in public?
You know, this is the insight that every founder sort of comes about. After they've failed. So if you ever see, like, a developer founder that you think has is killing it, they'll have one of these stories, which I'm about to tell you, which is I built something and I spent a lot of time on it, and nobody wanted to use it. So
Wow.
I I think 2016 2017 was, was when I started building this app called Museon, which was Spotify for Muse. So the idea was you would wake up every morning. And based on the topics that you've selected, it can gather than the use from across the world, and put into, like, a tiny podcast that you can listen to as you, you know, commute to your work day. I did all the the, quote, unquote, the right things, which is talking to people before you start building it. So I had I gathered up my friends and family, kinda like how to chat with them and and and kinda made the mistakes along the way, which is how much would you pay in that, you know, they said, oh, you know, I'll be I'll be okay with paying $5 a month kinda deal.
Yeah. I'm like, perfect. I took that as verbatim, and I started building and I started building and building and building, and suddenly it was a year and a half of me just building this, like, app. It didn't launch on on, Android and and play in Apple Store, had a couple of users sort of early people trying it out, but nobody was really, like, 1, they couldn't find any value in it, which was concerning. And number 2 was there was not even a single talk about charging for it because it wasn't delivering any value.
And then my my thing was, okay. You know what? It probably doesn't work for these folks that are around me. Let me do a product hunt launch because that's how you win. Know, you build a product, you launch a product hunt, and then you're a millionaire next day.
I put it up, and I think I put it up and there's always one up vote, then I then I created another account. I gave myself an up vote. Now there were 2. And for the whole day, I think that you have around, like, 6, 7 up votes. And I was very discouraged.
You know, you spend all your are you thinking time on this one thing every weekend for the last year and a half? I was thinking about this thing. I was building this thing. And just to see it kind of fall flat, I think it's still on my product contestory, and I scrolled to it sometimes And I think it ended a day with, like, 12 up votes. And the that was a payback of like, all the work that I had put in, and I just thought to myself, the the this is not right.
Right? The the not just a ROI, but just a respect is there either. Right? I gotta make people care about this. Yeah.
I'm so So That's when it I I turned off the coating side of my brain because, you know, that's something I've been doing every day for last, like, as a career and just like a as a hobby of myself for last 8, 10 years, that part I know I can do. The parts are completely missing is this marketing the sales part of it and even the design part of it. Which I have zero experience with. So I decided to just assume that my coating was a black box. Right, that if I could feed in instructions, a product would come out of it one way or the other.
So I actually don't even need to think about it in my equation. What I do need to think about is this marketing and sales part. So the next thing I built or the next thing I I I try to, make money off of was taking an existing product and trying to do the marketing sales for it. So I I I think I'm one of our buddies want to, you know, those are market market, like, local markets, there was in Toronto. There was a local market that was selling, Blueberry flavored honey.
Oh, yeah. It's amazing. Yeah. It's amazing. If you ever had it, like, you put it on a toast, it's it tastes amazing.
But I was like, oh, you know what? Let me just take these. And they sell a white label version of this. I can, like, actually take that, put them on own packaging and try to sell this. And let me see.
If I can actually do it because if I can take a prebuilt product and sell it, that means that I'm learning these other things that I don't know about. Long story short, We bought 50, 60 jars of the sink, and we sold it in our office, like, on my office desk, and me and my buddy would just sell it sell it there in lunch breaks. And so we were able to sell the whole 50, 60, jars in, like, a couple of weeks.
That's amazing. Yeah. Well, you mentioned this. Well, first of all, I wanna just I love that the mentality you had afterward? Cause I I can I I was trying to be in your shoes and just, like, trying to imagine all those emotions, right, like, all that time you spent and then the product hunt resolved?
And in product hunt, uh-uh, upvote isn't even, like, a very good metric. Right? It's like, it's just like, oh, it's just like a little like. So the fact that you weren't even getting, I mean, likes must have felt just So with the village, you're just, like, 12? Like, come on.
So I was just sitting with that and try and imagine that emotion. And But what I admire so much is is basically your resilience, right, be able to be like, okay. Something needs to change. And you were able to even think about, like, okay. How do I how do I, take a baby step up changing and and and and practice something which mentioned was this marketing aspect, the selling aspect, and then you were able to kind of pivot to an experience that wasn't even software.
It wasn't even, like, really type product based. Right? And, yeah, what were also what were some of the things during that experiment that you guys done? You mentioned about, like, putting the label, obviously, having a product inventory, but what are also some things that you were doing, either selling wise, either marketing this, this blueberry, what were the things that you tried? And
Yeah. It was actually, honestly, what I wanted to try was word-of-mouth. So Yeah. And the office was a great place. And by the way, I worked with an intern at IBM.
So everyone around me was kind of my age or a little bit older. So what we would do is we would do you know, walk up to people and be like, our friends and be like, oh, you know, we're selling this, like, honey thing. It's really good. Do you wanna come try it on our desk? And, you know, we would have, like, a tiny toast and a and a tiny spoon as well.
And, you know, they'll just try it. And it's something that's, like, not that well known, even I didn't know about that you can have, like, different flavors of honey like that. And so unique taste as well. But that actually giving them the first hit work really, really well because now you can just say, oh, you know, it's $5 or, like, $7, whatever that is. Here's the jar.
And they take it and they try it and, obviously, it's good. They they come back with good things. But now you go to the next person and say, oh, yeah. We're selling this thing. By the way, you know, from, accounting bought from us yesterday.
Right? And so when you're in a tightening community and there's a word-of-mouth, it's all it becomes almost like why would I not buy this thing? And so that's the way it kinda, like, spread around until to the point where one of our friends was having a bunch of people coming over. I think it was for a celebration. Some sort of a celebration that his family members were coming in from different places to this one spot.
And he was like, can I get 20 of these?
Wow.
I've been I've been yeah. Yeah. Exactly. So, you know, he we had sold him a jar. He liked it, and he was like, you know, my friends and family are coming over.
I need them I I need to give some sort of a souvenir, something something cool that they can take back. And I think the honey would be a great fit And so within, like, a couple of minutes, we we sold them, like, 20 jars. And so just doing all those things, I would have never done this with my software pro the the Museum app that I had built, but Yeah. Being able to just separate myself from a product and just purely thinking, about how to move this thing. The isolation part really helped me understand the power of word-of-mouth referrals, all that kind of things.
Because if it was still a software founder, I would have been, like, my first thing would have been, like, what other features I can add and that reality is it doesn't matter how many features I can add. It's not gonna do anything. Nobody's gonna find it. And so by by isolating, kinda like when you go to a gym, Right? And you do chest 1 day, you're only doing marketing for this one one, product.
That's all you're doing. You don't have control over the product. You don't have control over anything else. Just the marketing part. Yep.
Yeah. Say more about this isolation because I find that really interesting. Like, how do you let's say even today as a founder, how do you think about that, and how do you practice that? Do you try to just like that gym metaphor, right, do you almost, like, switch modes. Like, you're like let's say you give yourself a deep work of, like, 2:2 hours, 3 hours, And then after that, you're you're you're gonna switch to your biceps, which is your marketing.
Right? And then you and this is where you you start thinking on that hat. You start visualizing. You start tweeting. How do you practice the isolation and and what you do today?
The way I was doing it, and the way I do it today is a little bit different. Kind of the same, though, where you actually don't carve I I I don't believe in carving out x number of hours for x x skill. I I feel like you really have to swim in it, dive deep into this one thing. If you're gonna do marketing, gonna learn about it. It's not enough to just practice it or, like, try to do it, but consume it.
Right. So, go out and listen to YouTube tutorials or, like, YouTube tutorials on marketing. But then listen to people like great marketers. Set Goed in, for example, read books about them. Right?
Obviously, practicing is another one And you basically wanna swim into the topic as much as you can. That goes for marketing, that goes for copywriting, that also goes for, design as well. Any of these skills, if you wanna, like, just learn design, you have to start listening to, in a podcast was listening to yesterday was how linear, the project management tool kind of makes, how how they craft the product? Because it it's a very beautiful product. So you have to go listen to those kind of things, then watch tutorials on Figma and then actually try to do make a thing on Figma and then also go maybe to some apps that you respect and try to recreate them on Figma.
And and so that's the only way. And you do that consistently for, let's say, 30 days, 60 days, 90 days. That's the only way you can really isolate your your muscle. Otherwise, I feel like it's mostly because if you carve out, let's say, 4 or 5 hours to do marketing, you actually don't know anything about it. So it doesn't really matter how much you wanna try to do it.
It's just not gonna happen. You're just not, in that mindset. A person that you can follow that does this really, really well, is Peter Wang on, on Twitter. I think he's a complete beast at this. What he does is he does x number day challenges on a specific scale.
I think right now, he's building he's designing mobile apps on Figma. So every day, he just picks, let's say, Instacart app and then tries to 1 to 1 recreate that screen in Figma. And I think that's a great way of of flexing that muscle very specifically.
Yeah. Wow. That's really interesting. That parts of that resonate with me, you know, as a as a journalist who likes to have kind of a broader domain knowledge across different things, like, from design to to, you know, better with no code, things like that. One thing that I I I often think about or even struggle with is thinking about how Because I also wanna build skillsets that in a way, like, I wanna almost do it for for for, like, the next 5 years.
Right? That's maybe how I think about I'm gonna come to this consistency. Like, hey. This is something I wanna be just a tiny bit better each month, but as long as I just, stretch out the time frame, like, I can give myself that room. So how would you compare that with what you just talked about, which is, like, it's more, almost like more in sprints, right, saying like, hey.
Well, now we're gonna be swimming this pool this waters and just be really knee deep and and just, like, be, very involved with it versus, like, Doing just a bit of it each day. How do you I don't know. How do you compare those 2? And, what what is your where it stands on that?
Yeah. I mean, that's a number one thing is actually being intentional about it. So that's great that you're saying. You know, in 5 years, I need to be better at this at this one specific thing. In terms of actual execution, I feel that the 1st 30, 60 days that you're swimming in it, you're actually getting yourself familiarized with the jargon, with the best practicing with just, like, the the mindset, the the basics that you're missing.
Now the basics of marketing or copywriting is pretty simple, actually. Like, you know, there's a specific way of writing and consistency is another one, but there's not it's not a, like, a biology or rocket science course where you have to sit in it for, like, x number of years before you can really understand it. So you can get up to speed with it pretty quickly. What you're doing in those, 1st 30, 60 days is just getting your mind aligned with what's expected from a marketer, from a designer. Right?
So once you have all the context, then you can start carving out that x number of hours for design. And because you already have the context and you already know where the if you get stuck, who to find. So for example, right now, I I do writing as well every day. Right? And I find Justin Walsh's writing to be amazing.
And so if I sit down for 3 hours and I get on if I get stuck to get unstuck, I just go to Justin Walsh or Jacob Greenfeld. He's another writer that I really respect. So I I just go back to their thing and I get unstuck and then just continue on. But the the reason I I can do that is because I've spent that 30, 60 days learning about them, learning who they are, and swimming in their their knowledge pool, whatever they put out, and just knowing marketing in general. Right?
Because of of those basics, I can actually sit on a on a 3 hour pine block and actually try to execute every day. So I think the the way I would execute is If you don't know anything about a discipline, spend 30, 60 days swimming in it, podcasts, books, practicing it yourself, looking at how other people have done it, all that kind of stuff. And then once you're comfortable with it, then you can start doing time blocks and being more consistent every day until the 5 year mark.
I love that advice. I love that you're connecting those 2 and just highlighting the importance of each part of that learning. Right? Or you I think something that's been really clear to me and and your journey is that you're someone who's definitely very has an incredible student mentality, right, in terms of like, hey. Well, one, it's fun to learn, and I wanna learn how to learn Like you said, you you that was a framework of how you approach learning, you know, but you, you know, tying back to what you we we we started with.
You even mentioned that you know, in in during at least the 12 year school, during that period, you didn't felt like you were the best student when you had to to take tests or or or or or, I don't know, do do those homework, things like that. Where do you think that student mentality came from? How did you became How did you became the type of student that wants to just keep learning for the sake of joy or or exploration or improvement?
Yeah. It's it's, it's honestly so I'm not a super religious person. But I am a sick. And the word sick, literally means to learn. It just it just the word for learn is a sick.
And which is the reason why you are a sick, who's a learner, and then your guru who teaches you And I I I think my for myself to be a good sake, I need to learn. Right. There's nothing in my head. There's nothing worse than if somebody is asking for help and you're there to help, but you just don't know how to help or you don't have the capacity to help. That's probably the worst thing you can ever do.
Right? Somebody's asking you, oh, you know, I need help with this and you're like, I wanna help you, but I just don't know how. Right? That's an awful feeling. I personally think to have.
Right. So I always wanna be in a position where if anybody asks me something, I can provide something useful. Whether that's something that I've learned or maybe I can point it out point out another person that, you know, you can go to them and then they will help you out. Right? It's a very, So it comes from my the religion.
And just a small little fact to it as well is seeks where, turbines on their head and they're typically very bright. And the reason for that is if ever you're in trouble or, like, you need help, you should be able to point out a sick in the crowd, and they will help you.
Wow.
Whether you're a stranger or not, Right? So you point you you point to them and you say I need help and they are, like, almost mandated to help you. Right? That's that's kind of like the culture that I come from. That's the origin that I come from.
So I wanna be that as well. So I think that's where my learning mentality sort of comes in I wanna be seen as a resource. So to be a resource, you need to learn. You can't stop.
Yeah. I love that. I love that connection to the word too. Well, I didn't I didn't think that would had a connection to, like, some kind of religious thing. And I I actually absolutely love that.
I think once you you wrote about wanting to be kind of the go to person, for Canadian, nontechnical founders, in terms of, like, learning how to build or or or be a founder. Right? If there's one, let's just say, one takeaway, that if if there's a is a listener who was a Canadian founder listening, what is that what is that thing you wanna teach them. What is that one thing that if you you would want to impart for them that will really help them in their journey?
What I would say to them is is something I would say to myself when I had that, the failed launch with Museon. Is I think you have to stop thinking like a developer and start thinking like a developer founder. A dev founder or technical founder. What that basically means is coding is just one little piece that you need to know. A successful founder not only knows about coding, but marketing, sales, copywriting, even personal finance.
All these things will make you an ex exceptionally better founder every single time you add a skill. That that doesn't mean that you have to be the top 1% at any of those skills. Actually, it means the opposite. It means that you just know enough to be dangerous. But you have to be intentional about learning each of these things in isolation.
So, you know, if you wanna be a better founder, pick design, stick to that for 30, 60 days, get the basics in, switch to cock writing, and go on that and just start becoming more consistent, in in how to approach learning new things. That's a difference between a developer and a technical founder. And I promise you, every single time you add that skill in, you'll be way way your your likelihood of being successful goes way, way higher. So just be open to learn it.
Yeah. Why why would the likelihood be so much higher when they're learning all these different skill sets? Because it's sometimes easier in in fact, as a journalist, I had to, like, kinda persuade myself, be like, hey. Even, like, reading books, sometimes if I'm not just reading about the same things, I knew that all these knowledge and how they compliment and relate to each or in in abstract manner could contribute to this return or this creativity that I can't really imagine. So why why are you confident that it could make them more successful at this having all these skill sets?
They're not exactly relevant to maybe right now, what you're doing, which is building this app and try to growing and scaling it, like, getting a customer. Right?
Yeah. It's it's because let's say you're exceptional at one skill. Let's say it's coding for me, and maybe I'm the I'm the point 1% of that. Yeah. Now if I have no writing skills, I can't or communication skills it broadly.
I can't tell any anybody about why I'm the best.
Absolutely.
What the overall, equation that becomes is even though I'm great, nobody knows it. So it's almost like I am not great. So now if I'm not even, let's say, I'm not even that great. I'm like, top 50%. Like, that's that's how good of a developer I am or a quarter I am.
But I can actually talk about it I can give, like, 20 talks in a week or in a month. Now all these people think I'm 1 top 1% because that's all they've seen. Right? So being able to now, again, you don't need to be great at, at, public speaking and also you don't have to be great at, coding, but those 2 things combined, the fact that you have them make you way more successful than if somebody had only the the public speaking skills and no coding skills, or they just had insane coding skills, but no speaking skills. Right?
Doctors, for example, they make a lot of money. You know, they'll they'll get a 1,000,000, whatever, a 1,000,000 plus, worth the salary. But they're horrible at investing or personal finance. Yeah. Right?
So so it's a very known fact, but they they just don't know how to invest because, like, their expertise is in doing, the medical stuff. They don't know about S and P. They don't know about any of these things. They don't know about compounding. So if you were a person that was making, let's say, 200 k, and a new but personal finance, in the long run, you'd be way more successful than this doctor making a 1,000,000.
Yeah. Yeah.
Some of the ways that that works.
I I love that last example you gave, which is really hard to comprehend, right, because like I said, in the short term, the the doctors making more money, right, that's that competitive advantage, competitive advantage, technically hasn't kicked in yet. So it takes like a very long arc thinking. Well, one thing I I wanna make sure I could get a chance to ask, which is When I was looking through your list of projects you built, right, throughout the 8 years, One thing that keeps ringing to me is that this is someone who not only had, like, a vision, but also was someone who who didn't give up. Right? Like you said, after the that failure with Nucyon, you were pretty bummed but you didn't stop you.
And it could have somebody who's like, nah, I'm gonna I'm gonna stick with full time, engineering and that, you know, I'd I'm don't care about founders. So What what was behind that optimism? And has there been days or experiences that that that's dimmed. How's, you know, what's that been like?
Yeah. I it's it's mostly because I think building a startup is such a an easy not an easy, but it's, to me, it doesn't feel like a risky, but at all. There are other things in life that are way more riskier. Even if if even if your product fails or something that you did fails, even let's say you raised money and then your your your startup blew up and you know, now you're back at 0. The fact that you've done that work to get your product from like 0, completed from scratch, raising money, and then failing, you actually come out ahead of 99% of other developers that are out there.
That I've never done this thing. So anytime anytime you have a project that you built out and it failed you actually come out just by the virtue of living through it, your skill set, your mentality, your charisma, your your branded brand comes out ahead of everybody else that didn't actually try at all. So that's what I always look to that that's what I always look to do. And that's actually my reward is that I'm learning with the with the the honey example, I just learned how powerful referrals and word-of-mouth is. If I hadn't done that, I wouldn't have known that.
So even if it had that had failed, that's completely okay because now I have this added knowledge into my head that I can apply for the next 10, 20, a 100 projects that I'm gonna do, and I'm not sure a step ahead this time. So that's what I like to think about is every single time you you go through the loop of, like, I'm gonna try building something. I built it and didn't go through. Okay. Let's do it again.
But this time, your circle is such a bigger because now twenty people from before knew you because you were doing this thing previously. So now you're, like, you're already starting out with 20 people that I know you that you didn't know you before. So the likelihood of success likelihood of success is much, much higher this loop, by the way, keeps going bigger and bigger every single time. And so the more bets you the more bets you take this circle is gonna get so much bigger that one day you're gonna wake up, you know, think of an idea and you're gonna have a 100 k investment ready to go. Or 100 customers ready to go.
Right?
Yeah.
And so you have to always believe that. And and that's why I say startups is such a not a risky game for me because it will happen. There's no way if you keep taking the bets that it's not gonna happen. There's absolutely I I I refuse to believe it.
Yeah. Wow. I that's such a refreshing take, though, like, to even that sense that you just said, which is starting a startup is not a risky bet. That is such a refreshing sentence. And and I and the visual you describe it as a circle, right, because that is just so powerful to me.
But so now you're someone who has drawn the circle quite a few times. It's quite big now. You're almost like very and I'm sure you're very proud of how you know, it took a lot of work, a lot of iterations, and this circle feels like a place where you finally found some momentum. Well, something that still scares you.
What scares me is the thing if you spend time building something and you put a lot of love into it
Yeah.
It's one day you wake up and everyone kind of is like, I'll just move on to something else. That is a scary thought. It's very real thought as well because that happens to project every day and all day. So, yeah, that's the most scary thing, I think. I don't think I will stop building Like, that's not a real risk or a risk I have or real fear.
The real fear I have is people will stop caring.
And how do you deal with that? Let's if people stop caring about engine, let's say, take example. Yeah. How do you
It's, you know, if if people stop caring about engine or, like, anything I'm working on, well, they're paying attention to something else. Right? Yeah. So what is that something else? And is that something that that you build up next.
Can that can that can it can it be in that direction instead? Right? And because you're taking so many bets, you have the capacity to do so. You say, you know, we tried on this thing. Right?
It it looks like the market or or folks are caring about this other thing, can we can we also move to that thing? Right? So so the way to reconcile or the way to combat that is go where the people are. Right? If that's what I care about.
If I care about people caring about me, then I need to go where they are So if they're not on my side, whichever side they are on, I need to go there. And so that's the the joy of building. Right? You continue to figure out what people need in real time, and your job is to build things that resolves their pain or resolves their problem. And you get joy in actually giving them the solution.
You know, every single time someone comes up and says, oh, you know, you built this thing or you wrote about this thing and that really helped me. You know, that's a that's a great reward to have.
Yeah. Absolutely. Yeah, I love that. Thanks for sharing that. I have just 2 more remaining questions.
There's one that's a fun one that I've been wanting to ask you out of curiosity. Which is why why do you hair hit haircuts?
I'm so curious. I wonder where you got that from. I'll be curious I'll be curious to find out, like, where where that was from. I I do. I I completely hate them.
It's because I wear I wear glasses. And you wear glasses as well. So I I I bet you can relate is when you go to a barber and you say, you know, I want medium high fade or whatever that is. You put your glasses down, and, you know, they're spending 30, 45 minutes doing their thing, then they then they then they're like, you know what? You want you wanna check right now and you put your glasses on, and it's just completely different from what you what you originally thought it was gonna be.
I know, you know, it's already done. There's something I can say about this. There's nothing there's no glue that puts them back on. So you just have to always say, you know, it looks great. It's awesome.
And you just gotta roll the punches. And so I've had that experience many times. I I used to have the same barber so they wouldn't know. They just got too busy. Like, too many people started coming in.
They had they ended up being, like, a 2 hour wait before I could see the guy So I'd now just go to anybody that's free, at the time and but that comes off with this this horror. I I don't know. It's real short fingers, this kind of box where, you know, I put on my glasses. It could be good. It could be bad.
Enough. And I I don't I don't get control over it.
Talk talk about risky bet. Right? Like
Yeah. Choose Mass of the risky.
I I've the moment you said it, I was laughing already because I I I obviously feel that pain point and which is one reason that I go do one person all the time. You had to establish a lot of trust and iteration. Be like, okay. She knows exactly what I'm talking about. Right?
Yeah. It's funny because I've also, you know, I wear glasses, but sometimes for sports, I'll put on contacts. But I will I'm glad it's majority of time. It got to a point where I would see going to haircut as, like, sports because that, oh, this is an event I have put on context so that I don't
have to go
issue.
That's hilarious. Yeah. Maybe I should do that. I just don't wanna I I've never gotten used to, or I've never had contact lenses, but it might be it might be worth getting them just for this one activity.
Yeah. Wait, what was the question about the contact lenses?
No. I've just never had them. Oh, yeah. I just never tried them. Yeah.
But I'd be curious if, like because I know the cost per per, like, per lens, which I'm not that big a fan of?
Yeah. I think, well, for me, I have a small I wanna use a hack, which is I've noticed that, contact latencies in the US, for some reason, costs significantly, higher than back in Asia. So a lot of times usually, you know, we'll get actually get those contact lenses from Asia and bring it over. But I also has found that, well, I used to, I used to live in LA, and no one wear glasses. There for some reason.
I actually remember being in the classroom of, like, two hundred people, and I generally looked around and noticed, like, I am I am, like, 5 out of a hundred people, two hundred people wearing glasses. And maybe it's because it's mostly women and, you know, they care about how they look. So the first time I felt confident wearing glasses, actually, New York where it's just a different aesthetic. But I would say having on hand, like, a Let's just say a daily contact lens that you can rely on. Feels like just, like, really, Nifty do you have?
Because one, in these scenarios, you could always pull it out, or you you're, I don't know, worry about movements and things like that, but also, my my partner reminds me sometimes for date nights, you know, putting on context, she also makes it feel like special because She get to see my my whole face.
That's where it's peak.
Yeah. Okay. I love I'm so glad I asked that because I knew there was a a story there, and and I didn't know who hit so close to home. So I appreciate you sharing it. Absolutely.
K. One of the last questions I have is about SEO. You know, you once tweeted that you find SEO fairly beautiful and you describe it almost as a Digital River that flows in real life. What for you, why do you find SEO so beautiful? Was inspired it.
And how would you say to someone who who doesn't really get it? What what would you what would you say to him?
Yeah. It's it's it was after I had done a bunch of different kind of experiment on, you know, trying to get traffic. You know, I was, or trying to do marketing, you know, I was doing paid ads at some point. I was doing social media where you pay a a popular page, a popular Instagram page at 20 bucks to have a story of you. And so I tried a bunch of different ways of getting traffic, and I really found SEO to be the most optimal one that really resonated with me.
So the way to think about it is every day there's people that have problem Right? There's people that have problems on on this one side. And then on the other side, there's businesses that have solutions to those problems. And the SEO is literally just calibrating them at a point where they both sort of coincide with each other until a transaction happens. So what what I find beautiful about that is there's no real, trick involved other than the fact that you need to write things in a way as a business.
You need to write things in a way that you know your customers are searching for, and that's the entire SEO strategy. Right? That's what you're hiring the SEO tools, the SEO agency to to look at is What are people typing? And is there any place where my business or my product could be a good answer to your question? So that just that just seems super beautiful to me, and the added benefit of the fact that the growth in SEO is exponential in nature where let's say you put out a first blog post, then you put out a second one, the third one, the n plus 1th blog post, is gonna take, the the rankings, the, the traffic that the end post up until now have gotten.
So the end post 1 is gonna be always higher. Right? And then the, the all end posts are gonna be linking back to an n plus 1, which means all the traffic, all the work that you put in to the end posts are gonna be automatically transferred to the next one that you put up. So anytime you write a blog post, you're starting one step higher every time. Versus in paid ads, if I put in a 100 k or maybe a 10 k budget for Facebook ads, and I get 100 sales.
Yeah. The next 10 k I put in, I'm starting at 0 again. Yeah. And then it just keeps on going like that. So it's very linear.
Whereas with SEO, it's very exponential. So it starts off very slow. But it picks up speed in year 2 or 3. Most of the successful B2B SaaS companies that are out there they use SEO to grow, Canva Zapier 2 examples. And so I really think it's an under utilized way of marketing, and all B2B SaaS should be actually using SEO to a point where they are getting customers this way versus trying to, you know, pump more money to pay it as and whatnot.
You can do that for short term growth, but I think for long term SEO is the go to
Yeah. I mean, I really love the way you describe just, like, the compounding nature of it, like, the n plus one that that the describing what happens when when each black book comes out because, I mean, in my brain, I keep thinking about how I was able to learn about kind of the building blocks of even person development, right, how understanding compounding effects That is actually feels like the better investment, right, and I'm relating that to how you're you're you're envisioning that for for for companies who wanna grow. So as kind of the last spiel, how does engine fit into this? This world. Right?
How does engine help with this SEO, either a gap or or like, lack of awareness or problem that you see people experience?
Yeah. You know, I'm always, wary of folks that are building things in isolation. I I and a lot of tech founders kind of have the the habit of building things and then putting them out and then it not working. That's happened to me multiple times, and it's happened to basically every other technical founder I've seen. My vision for the world is that any startup that's a good product that comes out.
I want them to survive. I want them to actually thrive, and the first step is getting customers. Getting real customers mean there's a way for you to get revenue and so on and so forth. Right? In my world, any startup that comes out can get customers immediately.
And the way I wanna do that is with SEO. So engine kind of fits into that philosophy where it's a platform for organic growth. So, any tech startup that are building a product, they but they don't have enough, time to do growth and marketing, they can use engine to start growing on their own. The way engine helps is currently you need a tool for multiple different parts of the SEO strategy piece. So you need a part where, you know, you do keyword research, and then you might have heard you know, I need a writer.
I need a place to throw somewhere to write this thing. And then I need to now publish it somewhere. So maybe, like, what flow or somewhere? And then I need to look at my Google search console to look at how are they performing? So all those things are different are in different places.
And so as a founder, you're now juggling bunch of different spreadsheets or docs to figure out what's even going on and nothing is real time. So what ends up happening is all this work kind of goes through and you do it once and then you never look back at it. Engine, it's supposed to be a one stop shop where you come in, we give you ideas, then you write those ideas, you publish them right away, and then we have real time analytics to figure out what you put out, you know, a month ago. How's that performing? If that's performing well, Great.
Let's do let's do more of that. If it's not doing well, okay, is there something that we can change and what do we think we should change into? Because there's a myriad of different options or different angles you can take. What are the most successful angles? So we just give you them, you know, maybe try writing it this way.
Right? And then you you make those changes and then we feed it back into the first step, which is what things you should write about. Now we have the data to know what works and what doesn't, we can give you better recommendations. So that's kind of the idea. I wanted to be, you know, a one place where you write, analyze and then write again and analyze, write again, analyze.
So it really becomes kinda like a organic growth on autopilot. That's the vision I want. Every startup to be able to use.
Yeah. That's amazing. And I I I absolutely love that vision you have. And I also I've saw recently that you're also starting to use it for your own writing because I, like, it sounds like one of the isolations you're doing is also just continue to be a better writer. Right?
Is that something you're also trying to utilize to to grow or to, like, improve and things like that?
Yeah. Absolutely. The the thing is that I had started this one blog. Actually, after New Zealand failed, I had a lot of, free code, and just a lot of work that I'd built up a year and a half. So I didn't want it to go to waste.
So I put it up on a website with, like, different blogs about about building a SaaS. So, like, if you wanted to put in authentication, how to do it. If you wanted to put in subscription payments, how to do it, and it would just, like, copy pastable code And that that writing, I I I think wrote 20 to 25 different articles. They did really well, but I just never went back to update them again. And there's a real friction to the way it's done right now, like the the writing process.
And so I was like, oh, we're building a better writing process. I've been wanting to update my blog for for, like, years now. Why did I bring it in and sort of start you dog putting my own product. So now my actual bug runs on engine, and so I'm actually using it and being like, oh, man, if it did this, that'd be so cool. And then I should go in and build it.
So then that part is live to every one of our customers. And then I can use it. They can use it. They like it. That's great.
And then sort of continue off from there. Dog putting your own product. That's been a real real unlock for us in terms of, like, daily usage and just knowing what our customers are thinking when they're using the product.
Oh, 100%. Also just aligns with your your your passion, but your your your genuine belief in the product that yeah, that you can use it for your own. You're providing yourself value. So that's that's amazing. Yeah, I I'm I'm this conversation has been so fun.
I'm still just really inspired by you. I'm still sitting with a lot of the the takeaways you shared. Yeah. I just wanna mostly just thank you for being here for sharing your your story. Your the the the the the optimism, optimism, and kind of that mindset of, like, just keep going, kept shining through.
And I I I I felt it a lot today, and I I just really appreciate you bring bring that to the room.
Thanks so much. I I really I really really thankful to you, for bringing me on as your first guest. I I it's something on practices practicing as well. So it's really nice to to replace a safe space