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We interviewed Amar Ghose, co-founder of ZenMaid ($1.8m ARR).
In-depth conversations with bootstrapped entrepreneurs building profitable internet businesses. Including both members and friends of the Ramen Club community. Ramen Club is building the community, content and tools supporting founders to ramen profitable, and beyond.
Thank you so much for joining us today, Amar. So for everyone to say that what we're planning to do is we'll do a kind of interview for forty minutes, just a chat between Amar and myself, and then we'll open up for questions in the last twenty minutes. So, but as you have questions as we go, just post them in the chat and then we'll pick people to ask questions like towards the end, if that's cool. And yeah, just before we start, so Amar is the co founder of Zen Made. So I would show a bunch of you follow him on Twitter already.
Charlie:He's also an advisor at Sperry Stars Up, which Mash runs, and actually me, which I'm very grateful for as well. Yeah. How are doing, man? How are you feeling today?
Amar:Yeah. Doing well. Looking looking forward to
Charlie:this thing. It's gonna be a lot of fun. So Nice. Yeah. Love it.
Charlie:It's good to see some good
Amar:to see some familiar faces.
Charlie:Yeah. For sure, man. For sure. And, yeah, just to get things started because you're a quick time to do you have an hour? If it went over a tiny bit, would that be okay?
Charlie:Or do you wanna
Amar:stick Yeah. Yeah. I can go over by a little bit. I I had another call that I had pushed back by by thirty minutes just because you never know with these sorts of things. So yeah, I've got I've got thirty minutes.
Charlie:We'll try and keep it just in case. Yeah, just to get started. So I introed you already, but in your own words, like how would you describe what Zen Made does and who it's for?
Amar:So ZenMade, we provide like a scheduling software for maid services. So for domestic cleaning companies, if you think about like your average little maid service, not a franchise, oftentimes it's like a husband wife team that ended up with a couple of cleaners down the years. The very typical story is the wife was a good cleaner, started cleaning for her friends or something, and then eventually took on too much work, had to hire help. At some point, the husband came on and like helped with the back end or started doing the cleaning or something along those lines. And then fast forward five years down the road and like they wake up and all of a sudden they have a business.
Amar:So like we're perfect for that like very specific like group. And just in terms of being specific, but not for the sake of being specific, but just to be clear, one thing that's interesting is that if a maid service owner comes to us and is already a business owner, has digital marketing experience. If they're going like with the lead gen angle and all of that stuff, we're not the best fit for them. I wish that we were as like the marketer that I am, but the truth is we're not. It's just not where our product like fits in the market.
Amar:Yeah.
Charlie:Yeah. No, I got you. And just for our curiosity, what's the kind of range of the number of cleaners the service might have? What's the kind of low and high ends that you see?
Amar:Yeah, we have solo cleaners that are on there who just pay us the $49 like a month. And then I think our biggest customer pays us what, dollars 500 a month. So that's like, what, 70 cleaners, 80 cleaners, something like that. Mostly it's between three and eight is like our sweet spot, but the real range is three from many, like anywhere up to 25 and then above 25 are like mainly outliers.
Charlie:Yeah. So something I see often on Twitter is that kind of the bigger, more enterprise of customers turn out to be like less effort and less customer service to handle. Do you find that to be true with what you do or is that kind of, is it more complicated than
Amar:that? It's just different for us. They all complain. I don't really know like how else selected to describe it. They're all equally just as frustrating.
Amar:No, I don't know. We've got a couple like big clients, but when I hear about that, like, I think that the main thing there is that for Zen made, we don't really have control over like the size of our clients and we don't really have the ability to go out and to target bigger clients. We're not a good fit for the actual biggest maid services. So to me, it's just we service who we're a good fit for. The one thing that I will say is that the people that pay us the least tend to be the biggest headache on support.
Amar:I think once you get above $100 a month, they all seem to be a lot like easier going, but man, the number of demands that we take, and not like nice feature requests, the number of demands that we get from folks that pay us like $60, $70 a month is just, you know, way way too high.
Charlie:Yeah. Wow. That's crazy. So I wanna just go back a little bit in time. Mhmm.
Charlie:Just sort of a bit like in the early days and slightly before. And so what I'd like to ask is how did you get into kind of like entrepreneurship or building SaaS in the first place? What's your background that sort of led to that? Were you building stuff before Zen Maze or what's that story there?
Amar:Yeah. So I'll try to keep this short. To go way back, never really considered myself to be that entrepreneurial, but I think as I talk to more and more people, it's like, there's a couple of stories that I can think of from my youth that is okay. Maybe I was a little bit entrepreneurial. So the first thing that comes to mind is sixth or seventh grade.
Amar:I essentially just found a really good deal on candy. It was just like you went to the supermarket, you bought my candy and they gave you, or you bought anything. On the receipt that they gave you, there was a coupon on the back. And one day I noticed that the coupon on the back was like a dollar off candy that was already on sale and they didn't have any rule against a double use of that. You could use the coupon on something that was on sale.
Amar:And so I ended up just buying a bunch of candy for 7¢ a bar, then just went to school, undercut the vending machines, and just made a couple $100 until one of my teachers found out and threatened to go to the administration. I didn't stop or whatever. So that was the first foray. Then at some point I read Rich Dad Poor Dad, I'm sure a lot of people like here have probably read at some point. Can't say that I actually recommend that book, but it is pretty good from like a principal's perspective.
Amar:And the big thing I took away from that was don't climb the ladder, own the ladder. And that was something that I think always stuck with me that mainly I was thinking about real estate, but then as I got into other things, I realized that a business was just another, like another kind of like kind of asset that we could, that could essentially create that sort of that same like level of freedom. And so then so many of us, I read The four Hour Workweek. I grew up in Palo Alto, so in Silicon Valley. So I was essentially part of Tim Ferriss' target market right at the beginning of all of his marketing campaigns.
Amar:He was focused on LA, Los Angeles, and New York, and just wanted the books to be big there. So I was exactly part of that demographic. Read it pretty much when it first came out. And at the time, I was playing poker competitively online, was making a little bit of money like there. I was still like still in high school at the time, but I had friends online who I'd chat about hands with and stuff like that were already living in Costa Rica and were doing the digital nomad thing.
Amar:And so that's really what put the bug in my head of, okay, now it's not just escape the rat race, escape the rat race, travel the world. And that really put a lot more like of a solid sort of like why of the idea of like mini retirements and just not waiting until you retire to go out and to live life. And so when I read that was in 2007. And so for those of you guys, you know, that have followed me, we started Zen Made in 2013. So the time in between that I was in college and then short period after college that entire time trying different side hustles, micro niche sites, playing poker online, just to try to make money like remotely from anywhere in the world.
Amar:And then let's see, what else did I try? We tried like a t shirt business at some point, couple of other things like that. And then in 2012, we came across a thread on Reddit, me and a friend of mine that was talking about starting a maid service online. And so me and a friend followed that, started a maid service, and that's what led us to Zen Maid.
Charlie:It's awesome. Yeah. I love love hearing
Amar:that story.
Charlie:We'll try those cool stories. He was selling, like, snacks at school, but I didn't have any I wasn't doing anything interesting about that at that age. But that's interesting about how you got to ZenMaze. When that person was writing the Reddit thread, were they just talking about how they had themselves started one of these businesses or? Yeah.
Amar:Essentially, it was in more of almost like a launch format where he had twenty eight days that he had mapped out, but he just did it day by day, started at Maid service. What's funny is that he became one of my primary competitors that he launched a software to help all of these guys, and if they had launched that software sooner, we would have never launched Zenmate. We started working on it because he hadn't solved the software problem in the industry yet. So he actually became our biggest competitor a couple years down the
Charlie:Do you think this is like the other side of building in public, Is that sometimes you do open up these situations as well?
Amar:Yes and no. I think that if he, like, built a business and sold it for $3,000,000 or something, so I'm sure he's very happy with the result. I don't think that he cares at all that, like, I entered the industry and make a bit of money. A lot of people did office stuff, but he he certainly made a lot of as well. Yeah.
Charlie:Yeah. So it sounds like that post had some kind of evidence that this was, like, worth exploring. But with you and your co founder, was there, like, anything you actively looked for to prove that this was worth working on long term? I don't know. Sometimes you call that validation or whatever, but or we just we need to make this work at all costs and we'll see what happens.
Amar:It was a little, a little bit of both because what happened was that because of my experience as as a maid service owner and knowing like what we were up against on, like on the software side, we were pretty confident that this was gonna work. So once we decided on the idea, my friend Arun, who I co founded the business with, he got to work on the product and I immediately started doing cold email and cold calling to maid service owners. So essentially I went into full like sales mode and it took him what about six months or so to get the product into the hands of our first customer. And so by the time we actually launched it, I had essentially spent six months selling the product and had just been really waiting for the product to actually come out to begin collecting checks. That's what we thought at least, of course, like nobody came when we opened doors because that's life and business.
Amar:But we did have one customer that paid us a thousand dollars for like lifetime access to the software before before we we had even finished the the software. So like we do some work there and we did follow a lot of the validation best practices, but we completely ignored the don't move forward with the software until it's validated. But do as I say, not as I do. Make sure you validate guys, make sure you validate.
Charlie:Do you think that's a common issue in the kind of indie hacker, beach trapper community that, like, people just don't do enough of that?
Amar:Yeah. Definitely. But I think one other thing, though, is that I think it's it's also important to consider, like, when folks talk about validation, if you have an idea like Zen Made, you don't truly need validation because when we started, it wasn't a unique idea. There were already software companies that catered specifically to made services that had founders that were clearly earning a decent living. You had competitors that would provide these services.
Amar:We just have a different take and thought that we could do it a little bit better. But, and so like in that sense, and that's true of a lot of If B2B you're entering some market and you can already see that you're going to be one of multiple competitors, you don't need any validation and like contrary to like, you know, what's, I guess used to be popular and maybe it's still popular opinion, but having lots of competitors, that's usually a good thing because it means the validation is done, I'm done for you. But where I really see indie hackers and those folks getting tripped up is they don't go through the validation steps maybe because they're thinking exactly that. Where it's actually helpful is if you can't go out and validate that your idea is good, that means either the idea is bad or it tells you that you need to work on your sales ability and your messaging and how you actually present the product. So if it's something that's a validated idea, a lot of times the validation, like for us, my six months of validation, it wasn't validation.
Amar:It was literally me doing sales, but it gave my, like, my co founder that confidence that, like, what he was building was actually gonna make a difference and that he wasn't building something for another marketing guy that was just gonna disappear as soon as he realized that he couldn't sell it or whatever. You know what I mean?
Charlie:Yeah. Yeah. I want to touch on something you mentioned now about not just what the product does, but how you present the products. A bit like brand positioning. Is that something that you think about a lot?
Amar:It's something that we have thought about a lot in the past. It's not something that I think about much on an ongoing basis just because for Zen Made, we've been in business for nine years now. Our brand is very established. It's something I don't really have to think about, but yeah, like in the beginning, you're always trying to figure out what's the positioning that's going to work. A quick example there is we definitely thought that our software was going to take off because of these booking forms that we were going to give to clients they could place onto their websites and it was just going to help their businesses completely take off.
Amar:We thought that would be the hot new thing that once people saw that they would have to sign up for our software and first five, ten customers didn't even use that feature and we found out the only thing that they really cared about or the thing that caught their attention they thought was just so cool about our system was just simple scheduling plus SMS and email. And the fact that the SMS and the email were specifically designed for maid services that would be triggered around specific maid service appointment events, right? That little detail was something they just hadn't seen done well in any other like system. And so for me being on the phones, I very quickly realized that completely pivoted. We pretty much stopped showing that booking form feature until people had already signed up and we're using like we're using the schedule.
Amar:And we went through many iterations of that as the product matured, as our messaging matured, as our competition matured, all of that. Whereas now it's, I can tell you exactly where, like, where we fit in, which competition is better for who and all that stuff.
Charlie:Yeah. Because I guess you would you would make mostly would define yourself, correct me if I'm wrong, as more of this sort of growth and and salesperson. But it sounds like you had quite a tight relationship between when you were doing sales, but also research. Like in the process about selling, you're also getting insights you could use to improve the business.
Amar:Yeah, definitely. I essentially did everything non technical, including customer interviews. So essentially everything that I was doing was just protecting my co founder from having to be exposed to people. The more that I did that, the faster that we got code written. And that was just like six months of just all that stuff.
Amar:But I'm still like that even to this day, that if I see in support that someone's asking for a phone call and no one on my team is available, I'll jump on a quick call with a customer, talk them through some issue or talk to them on an intro call when they've just signed up, like signed up for ZenMate. And if they point something out, some feedback that they agree with, I'll type something up, have screenshots done, have it sent over to to the dev team. Then I still try to stay very close to that even, like, even nine years in. Of course, it's not like a regular thing, but every now and again, it's nice to be able to just, like, exercise that muscle.
Charlie:Yeah, absolutely. And I want to talk a little bit more about how you think about some of the growth tactics you've done. But I just want to go back again to in the early days, did you ever think about you and your co founder about what your kind of ramen profitable profitable figure was? Like, was there ever like, okay, this is a figure where we don't need any more at any to rely on our savings or to have side hustles and that kind of thing? And if so, how do you think about it?
Amar:Keep in mind that we took a very extreme approach to this. So what we did was we, so he was working or not working, was getting a stipend as a, as a grad student at Stanford university. And I was working a day job when like we started the company together. So we started in Q2 in 2013. And from there until February 2015, so almost two full years, we didn't pay ourselves a penny.
Amar:Like literally the only thing that we did was just like work. We paid all of our living expenses from our own stuff. The only money we took out of the business that I've talked about on Twitter was like three sushi dinners to celebrate things. That's the only thing that we ever spent money on as a company during those first two years. And we just poured everything back into the business, paid advertising, like all that stuff, because I was working full time.
Amar:I couldn't spend all my time like doing this. So when you fast forward two years, I think at that point we were making, I think we were making 7,000 or $8,000 a month. And at that point, I began paying myself $1,000 a month. And that's when I packed up and moved to Thailand. So I just I like I was literally like paying more than that in rent in California.
Amar:Was living in Mountain Dew and was commuting up to San Francisco every day. I essentially just packed up my shit, left my apartment, jumped on a plane, went to Thailand, and then was essentially just living off of $1,000 a month for what, probably the next year or so between Thailand and a tiny bit of Europe and stuff. We went very extreme that way. So then my co founder just didn't take out any salary for another year because he was still finishing up at Stanford and didn't need it. We just kept pouring more and more back into the business.
Amar:And then after about a year, then he stepped out as well. But even then we were only paying ourselves maybe $2,000 a month or something while traveling the world, but we pretty much just up and left The US and just cut our expenses that way. So he was mainly living in Bangkok for two years. And then I was doing like a bit of a bum rotation between girlfriend's parents at the time, my parents, etcetera.
Charlie:Yeah. So interesting in this community and looking elsewhere, there's so many different ways people make that transition from, like, their business as a side hustle to working on it full time. You savings, you move somewhere cheap, you wait so you have this much money. It just sounds so, like, context dependent. But are there any sort of principles that you think are applicable to, like, everyone's situation in these things, or do you think it's just, like, completely dependent?
Amar:The the one thing that I've noticed is that most people, if you don't like your situation, if you don't like your current job, then chances are whenever you leave, in hindsight, you're going to be like, I should have done it. I think there's a big exception for people that love their job and are like, yeah, I've got a side hustle, it's beginning to make some money. I get to work on really cool problems at my day job that I just am not going to be able to get to do Bootstrap. I think there's definitely like a category of folks that are like that, but the vast majority of people it's like the sooner that you go full time and double down, assuming that it's validated, that's like a big thing, right? If you're not making any money yet, don't quit your job and go full time and be like, Oh, but Amar said to, right?
Amar:That's not on me, buddy. But it's just one of those things where like, yeah, the vast majority of folks that I've talked to that have made that transition all in hindsight are just like, man, if I'd done it three months sooner, it would have accelerated many things. And oftentimes people are being overly conservative with savings and stuff like that. I don't think there's anything wrong with that. I don't think that you should pull the trigger on this early if it means that you're gonna be stressed the entire time.
Amar:I think that saving for an extra twelve months that you have an eighteen month runway that you're just not stressed as a bootstrapper is just like a godsend. You know what I mean? Yeah. That's probably the biggest thing.
Charlie:Yeah. Gotcha. And you were saying earlier how especially early on, you used a lot of cold email to reach new customers and that sort of thing. Like, in general, like, what sort of growth tactics has worked for you, and has it changed at different stages of your business as well?
Amar:Yeah. So it definitely changes a lot over time just as you, like, are dealing with, like, different scales and stuff. Like, for example, now I would never cold email because we just we have so many leads. It would just be such a nightmare to manage between like our opted in list and a cold email list and all that stuff. Like I just don't even want to touch it.
Amar:And we just, we have enough inbound leads to focus on, for example. So I've dropped pretty much all outreach stuff, but it also changes a lot with markets and industries and stuff that I don't know that I would really recommend cold email these days. I were starting out, I'd recommend the same principles. So for example, your audience, even if it's B2B, if your audience spends a bunch of time, but let's say it's e commerce owners, they might all be on Instagram. So maybe it's using Instagram DMs and then having a follow-up sequence there.
Amar:Maybe it's something that you can't do automated, but you can essentially use the same principles to identify who your target audience to reach out and to get in front of them and to get your first maybe five customers that way or something like that. These things definitely change over time. Did you want me to talk a little bit about how I think about marketing and growth hacks? Because I feel like it's a little bit different than this. Yeah.
Amar:The main thing, and I'll keep this short, just so you can ask where you want to go with it. But in a nutshell, the big way that I think about most of like our creative marketing that we've done, that some of you guys may have seen like on Twitter is at its core, what I'm always trying to figure out and the big question that I'm trying to ask myself is what value can I give to our audience or to my customers and ask for no money? And anytime that I can add value for free, it's a form of marketing. And one reason that I really like taking that sort of approach is it gets you out of just thinking about ads that I find for indie hackers. I feel like for a lot of indie hackers, that's a much more creative and fun and like opening way of looking at it.
Amar:Indie hackers, it's just like if you can build a little calculator tool because it'll take you one afternoon to do something cool for your industry that you'd never be able to sell, folks in your industry would find really useful. That's a form of marketing, right? That's not going to solve all of your marketing problems, but it's something it's an asset that you can now drive traffic to. So like for you guys that haven't seen me talk about this on Twitter, a big example of this for us is the MAID Summit. So that's a virtual conference that we do, right?
Amar:Everyone's familiar with virtual conferences. You see them all over the place. We were the first ones to do it in the cleaning industry. So we have, you guys go to maidsummit.com, talk about without necessarily endorsing Zen.
Charlie:Apologies, Amar. Did it lose it for anyone else for about ten seconds? Amar, did you hear all that?
Amar:It did. Yeah. Sorry. Okay. No, it was just ten seconds.
Amar:That's all. What was I saying?
Charlie:What that? You're about the the MAID Summit. You just start seeing on
Amar:the Summit. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So, yeah.
Amar:So with with the MAID Summit, it was just like, what's something that we can do that can get everyone in the industry essentially talking about us or sharing, like really sharing a web asset. Really what I'm trying to do is I'm like, how do I get people to this site so I can pixel them and then follow them around the internet on Facebook until like they're ready to convert. And so how do I get people to share some other, like some other link that is completely related to Zen Made and helps us, but doesn't make everyone in the industry feel like they're necessarily endorsing our software? So every single influencer in the industry wanted to talk about this event because they were speaking about it, but of course not every single one of them actually recommends us. Another example would be our Facebook group, which is Zen Made Mastermind on Facebook.
Amar:That's another one that we have that was the exact same thing. But that's actually the reason that we called it the MAID Summit and not like the Zen Made Summit or the MAID Summit by Zen Made or anything like that. We almost wanted to hide that it was bias until it really picked up steam in its own right.
Charlie:Yeah. Gotcha. I really like that that framework of like thinking of marketing as ways you can add value for free for people. Like it it it it feels more authentic and it just puts me in a different frame of mind of, okay, how can I add value for free
Amar:content made for profit? The other big thing there, I'm sorry, I'm spraying for mosquitoes right now because I'm on a tropical island and getting fit into shit right now. The other thing is that when you ask yourself that question, allows you to really think, like each individual, to really think about playing to their own personal strengths. So for example, I'm pretty much good at nothing except for like team building and maybe like finding the right people that for whatever like reason I'm able to bring teams together and just find the right people to fill like the right role. One thing that we did to build relationships, so yeah, two examples here.
Amar:One example is for, I think it was like 2014 or something. I went on to Fiverr and got the Zen made like holiday logo or the, sorry, the Zen made logo done with a holiday version. So it was like some designer or something, put it in a snow globe, some like insanely easy, like tasks costs like cost $5 So I looked at that and was like, oh, maid services should do this too. So we quickly did a little campaign that was just for Zen made customers. That was just like, Hey, send us your logo.
Amar:We'll do a holiday version for you. Like it's our gift to you like this holiday season. We paid $5 for every single, but of course people were talking about this thing. It wasn't something I was actually good at, but I just found someone to do it for $5 So we ended up doing it for maybe like 20 or 30 customers. Every single one of them posted it on their social media, tagged us, and it was just one of those things.
Amar:They never knew that it cost us any money to do. I never told them. Didn't matter. It was just something nice that we did, but that was just like one little example. You can see how, yeah, that's not going to bring us in any customers or whatever, but you can just see how this sort of gets like the wheels turning, right?
Amar:Ideas like that are what led us to the MADE Summit, which last year we made $30,000 just by running the event itself, let alone all the money we made on the back end from people signing up for the software. So then the second option or the second thing that we did, and this is something everyone in the industry can do, because of course you guys are like are all technical, probably good with websites and all that stuff. If you have any like old school consultants in the industry, any coaches, any partners, any influencers that just aren't as technical. I just dropped all of them an email back in 2014 and was just like, Hey, we're obviously much more technical than you. If you have any technical problem that you're struggling to solve, just send me a quick email and like me, someone on my team will take a look.
Amar:And it was the kind of thing that there were a couple of times that they came to me with something and I went on Upwork, I found someone for $100 $200 to just like to pay and to go and to fix their problem for them. Never told them, never passed on the cost. Guess what happens when we want to run the MADE Summit? I send out 30 emails inviting speakers the next morning, 21 have confirmed. It's little things like that.
Amar:But that's two ways that you could use that mindset to get ahead with your marketing and product and all that stuff.
Charlie:Yeah. Got you. I think we can probably do a couple more questions then we'll open it up for other people to ask Amro their own questions. And what do you think is the lowest point you've had? You want to share in buildings EnMate so far?
Amar:That's an easy one. I've recorded an entire podcast on that one. In 2017, we launched a redesign after, after close to a year of work, maybe more that, that we launched launched a redesign and it went horribly. Essentially, we critically took down the software, and this is the scheduling software for a maid service. It has all the information that folks need to know to get where they need to be and to do their job.
Amar:It's why they pay us the money. We critically took the software down from Monday at midnight until about Thursday at midday. So we lost about 40% of our recurring revenue over the following maybe four to six months. It took a little bit of time for people to to find alternatives and transfer off and do do all of that stuff. But that that was easily the low point.
Charlie:Oh my God. Yeah. How do you is a big part of something like that kind of just like just the mental side as well of just trying to like not panic too much and stay positive and stuff like that.
Amar:Yeah, exactly. It's yeah, a lot of it was the mental game. I think that a lot of entrepreneurs in that situation would have considered just like shutting down or just trying to get out of it and then just not continuing on. I look at that as a pivotal moment in software because yeah, it was a tough one, right? It was a tough one to communicate through.
Amar:It was a PR like nightmare. We had to make some tough decisions because you had a bunch of customers that were cussing us out and swearing at us and like trying to call us and stuff and were telling us to revert it back to the old version. And we couldn't do that, which was not a fun thing to to do. There were a lot of learnings from that obviously, but yeah, the mental game was definitely the biggest thing and it definitely did save us. It would have been a lot worse.
Amar:We would have lost a lot more than 40% if we responded the way that we did.
Charlie:Fair play for keeping going that situation. Not sure everyone would have been able to. Fair. Yeah. Are there some things like besides the situation there?
Charlie:Are there just some general things that you might have done differently if you started again on Zen Made?
Amar:That's a really like tough one to say, right? There are lots of things that I'm going to do differently for for my next business. But I think everyone will tell you that and that's because you have experience, you've developed different skills, like all of that stuff. I don't really have any regrets around ZenMate and how we started and stuff, because like, it's almost like thinking about theoretical butterfly effect kind of things, but almost everything that I could tell you that would have made Zen Made more successful in the future, I actually think would have led to not having worked for one reason or another. For example, if I had a more talented co founder, they probably wouldn't have worked with me for very long.
Amar:My co founder and I were perfect for each other at that time that like, I like had like sales experience, but was very green, very junior. And I'd run a maid service for a short period of time, but I looked like I was 12 and no one took me seriously. He was essentially learning to code at the time, but was a very talented coder. It was one of those things where, had yeah, it been anyone else, they wouldn't have stuck with me through those early growing pains. But yeah, second time around lots of things differently.
Amar:Primary one I think is going to be going a bit more like audience first, is I'm probably going to solve at least one or two of the marketing channel problems before I would really put a lot of effort into the actual product. You hear the cliche of first time founders think product, second time founders think distribution. I definitely believe that I would essentially figure out how we're going to distribute the software, and then I would figure out what does that distribution channel want, what does the product need, what requirements does it need to meet to fill that.
Charlie:Gotcha. And you're saying before, you're talking about what you might do for your next business. Do you have a kind of I know you don't like to, like, even book meetings more than a week in advance. Are you thinking much about the future of ZenMade right now or just enjoying where it is and feeling it out?
Amar:Enjoying where it is and feeling it out, but I don't really have much of an interest in selling ZenMade. I just think that it's too good of an asset to let go of. I just don't really see why I would sell it. With that, I'm still building the company to sell, but even now, if I wanted to, I could just step away from the ZenMade day to day operations for a month, three months, I would come back to a bigger business. There would be some ramifications like longer term strategy and stuff like that, but I'm already, I can already optionally step out of the day to day if I want to.
Amar:Just looking forward into the future, I feel like there's a decent chance that I'm going to be an owner investor in quite a few SaaS companies. I don't think I would want to do angel investing. I think I want to be a majority stakeholder or a majority partner. So me and a couple of friends having 20% each in something, or something along those lines with one person being the operator, or something along those lines. But that's something that I've thought about.
Amar:If I'm going to do a portfolio of SaaS companies, why sell ZenMade to then start that? Why not have Zen Made be like, be the first one? And then I've tried to do that with two, two companies now. So I bought 50% of one company from another indie hacker. I think we're gonna like back out of that one, like quite cleanly.
Amar:It's pretty much just tear up all the documents and just go back to before I was involved in that. And then I bought one during the pandemic two years ago, two years ago, that needed a bit more work than I think that we were initially thinking when we bought it. And so if we're being honest, ZenMaid was crashing pretty hard at the time. And as soon as I bought it, Zen made started skyrocketing again. And then I was like, oh, Zen made fun.
Amar:You know how it is when it's going, it's all the fun in the world. When it's not, it's I hate this business so much.
Charlie:Man, I feel you. I love I love this conversation, but I think we're gonna open up now. So if you kind of audience questions, let's see. There's different ways to do this. Does anyone wanna ask Amo a question?
Charlie:So we can either just do it. You can just ask it, like, with your voice or you can just post it in the chat and I can ask it for you. Yeah.
Amar:Should should we just go through the first ones that were just or I guess it's just one. Yeah. So it was asked, did did you bootstrap? So, yeah, we bootstrapped the entire company like ourselves. And then how does the overall timeline look from starting to okay, for that question about yeah, the how long it took.
Amar:If you guys check my Twitter, just check my pinned tweet. The pinned tweet goes through our revenue by year and it goes through what my actual take home pay was during that time. You can see that two years we didn't pay each other at all, pay ourselves at all. And then year three, I was paying myself maybe $1,000 a month, then $2,000 and then it really skyrocketed from there. But five five or six years into the business, I wasn't even paying myself like $3.03 k a month.
Amar:So it took a while. It took a while. Didn't go for VC because we just had no interest in going for VC. The point of the business was to was to build, like, lifestyle freedom. Also, I don't think there's any VC in their right mind that would have given me money.
Amar:Like, the big reason that we started the company, for me, it was a no risk proposition because no company would give me the time of day to do marketing, which is what I discovered that I actually enjoyed doing when I was running the the main service. So
Charlie:That's a yeah. Just to check. Rude, did you wanna ask a question? No. No.
Charlie:Sorry. I'm yeah. Just wanted to let you know that I'm still here. Awesome. Let's let's just go to the next one from Jack in the chat.
Amar:Oh, yeah. So Jack's question was what was the highest impact hire that you made either full time or contractor? The two answers there would be Chris, who's my who's my COO now. So he's, like, running pretty much everything, like, nontechnical on the team other than other than marketing. And he started out as actually a marketing intern for me that I hired him when I was actually here on on the same island here in Thailand that I'm on right now.
Amar:This is back in, I think, 2017. And he was, like, the first real hire that we made. And so that was a couple of, like, years ago. So he was essentially, like, person number three in the company, and now we have, like, close to, close to 40 or something. So he's the one that really came in and is, yeah, the true, like, more, like, operations mind that, like, I still decide on and would execute pretty much everything in the business, and he was the one that came in behind me and would turn everything, like, into a process.
Amar:So over time, he's essentially built out, like, the entire, like, Zen made playbook. Like, almost all of our documentation is, like, due to him or, like, now the team that he's hired. So that's probably the biggest one. And then, of course, our current CTO was, like, the primary contractor that we were working with back in 2017, and he's become the great brand. Like, both of them were at were at my wedding and stuff, and he's he's been leading our product team for four years now.
Amar:I don't know what I would do without him. If he quit, I would probably at that point, I would probably consider selling the business rather than going through the headache of replacing him. But then maybe there's a lot of content on YouTube. How much impact did it have on your growth? What lessons have you learned when working on your YouTube?
Amar:Okay. So I am not the person to ask about this because we are really bad at tracking results. My approach is we push it out there that is designed to help our target audience, and we just try to do that in bulk as much as we can. And we just think that it'll come back to, like, to help us. So honestly, no idea how YouTube has has helped our growth.
Amar:I don't even know how we would begin to, like, to attribute that. We can take a look at the views and stuff, and they're still smaller than we'd like. I think we have maybe 3,000 subscribers And, like, our views, it's beginning to get, like, more consistent, but we put in three years into YouTube before we really started getting any traction. And the reason for that is we don't really edit or create videos for YouTube. I've mentioned the Maid Summit earlier.
Amar:So the reason that we have so much content on YouTube is because we do the MAID Summit that has, what, fifty, sixty, talks every year. And then every year, we publish those on the YouTube channel over the following year. We drip it out one week at a time. So if you look at zenmate.com/magazine, you can see that all of the the YouTube videos, they all have, like, standalone articles as well on, like, on our blog. So we put out a ton of content marketing, yeah, there for that stuff.
Amar:But in terms of tracking, it's yeah. No idea. If you guys are interested, shameless plug. Check out my podcast that surround sound SaaS marketing. Your favorite local podcast player, I guess.
Amar:I don't really promote this very often. But if you're interested in that, I think it's the second or third episode where I talk specifically about our strategy for for the MAID Summit. And the title of that is, like, how we got paid $28,000 to create a year's worth of content. So essentially, that made summit event that we run, like we run that one event, and then I've never even spoken to the writers on the Zen Made team. And that one event every year creates a year's worth of content.
Amar:So I don't really have to think about the content team within Zen Made. I just focus on partnerships and paid advertising, and the rest of it just takes care of itself at this point. But that took years to put in place. I did that all myself for four or five years before getting it here.
Charlie:While we're waiting for some more questions in the chat, just I wanna ask, how would you summarize the kind of main safety Indie Hackers make earlier? You mentioned validation earlier, for example, but is there some way you try and summarize it?
Amar:Honestly, just comes down to not talking to users. That's really what it comes down to. No matter where you are right now, chances are you haven't talked to your users. I was lucky because I wasn't working on my product, so all I could spend my time doing, particularly at the beginning, was really talking to the users. But yeah, there's a good chance that it's not.
Amar:Did I put out again? It looks like I cut out.
Charlie:No, no, no. It was a bit rocky, but I think we got the gist of what you were saying. Yeah,
Amar:gotcha. Yeah, it's just not talking to customers enough. That's really it. So another question, what's my favorite tropical island to work from? That's the island that I'm on right now.
Amar:That's Copangan. I don't know how much you guys can see out here, but I'm sitting waterfront right here. And then where the lights are right there in this area is like a coworking space. So I'm like bungalow and then my wife is in the hammock right there. It's not a bad life.
Amar:It's not a bad life. There's a couple of beach dogs that have adopted us. It's great. Yeah. Yeah.
Amar:Yeah. And then I think we didn't really touch on like too much, but like, yeah, I mentioned that I started traveling in 2015, so I've been traveling since then. And I haven't lived like back in The U. S. So everything we've done has been like on the road.
Amar:The team's been remote since 2013 and yeah, been to thirty thirty plus 30 plus countries or something while building ZenMaids. That's pretty cool. Adrian's question. What difficultieslearnings did you have working on your multilingual SEO? We just used a plugin for that.
Amar:I forget what the name of it is. We just use some plugin that essentially takes care of that, like, for us. We went, like, the lazy route and did the same thing inside the software. We have translations inside the software just in, like, Spanish, Polish, and, like, maybe German or something like that. Let's see.
Amar:Any other questions here? Keep parameters for a valid product. That's a hard one, but I think just figuring out that you've got at least 10 people that are like actually going to pay you for the product for like five, ten people, I would say. I'm not really sure that's a feel one, but validation is really just like making sure that people value your product enough to pull out their wallets in order to use it. That's validation.
Charlie:Nice. Quivin, sounds like you got a question.
Ramen Club Member:Oh, yes. Just wanted to know how you got your, from zero to a hundred and hundred to a thousand in terms of your strategy in terms is it inbound, outbound, more? Because I do know a lot of public cleaners in that sense. Don't go to to the length of searching like a scheduling tool earlier on when you just started. Right?
Amar:Yeah. But the ones that aren't gonna be searching aren't likely part of our target market. So I'm not trying to reach those people. It's one of those things of you can try to get in front of everyone, but we want to get in front of people when they're ready. So all of our blog content is those people.
Amar:They may not search for a software, but they may look at how do I get more cleaning clients. And if our blog shows up, then we try to introduce them to the software, and that's when maybe they just they don't know what they don't know. So they don't know that they don't they don't, like, need it. But to answer your question about going zero to a 100 and a 100 to a thousand, pretty much exactly what you touched on. Zero to a 100 was essentially outbound, and then one lucky partnership that we actually landed because of outbound work that we were doing.
Amar:And then 100 to 1,000 was just a lot more inbound. It's been a long time since I've thought about outbound marketing. To me, all marketing is really inbound, but getting it off the ground. I almost think those first 100 customers, to me, it's more an exercise in sales, or at least it was the way that we went about it. That for me, was just I had done the math and I just knew if I spoke to 3,000 maid service owners, we were going to get 100 customers.
Amar:There was a good chance it would take way less than that, but I set that in my head of just like the goal is to just call 3,000 maid service owners or kill yourself, whichever comes first. Here we are.
Charlie:Nice. I'd love to hear you touch on how you thought about evolving your pricing over time, because it's something that the more I've read about best practices, you should treat it like a feature in itself that you rethink and evolve. What's your kind of what's been your approach to it?
Amar:We've only changed our pricing significantly, like twice that we. Yeah, we, at some point went from being 49 only to $49.99, $1.49. And then at some point, the major pricing thing, and this is in 2019, so it's been over three years since we changed our pricing, so we're long, long overdue for it, but we changed to usage based pricing. So we changed to $49 a month plus $9 per month per cleaner. And then the other thing was we also launched a free plan as well, which was another big, that's almost like a business model change.
Amar:That was an entire business model decision versus really a pricing decision. But with pricing, I think there are some good resources and some good books like that are out there. They're not, they don't tend to be geared towards geared towards SAS specifically, I haven't found too many good ones that are geared towards SAS. The guys from ProfitWell have got some good resources on it and stuff like that. But the biggest thing is figuring out a way to directly align the value that your users receive with your pricing.
Amar:The more so that you can align your success with their success, the easier time you're going to have expanding, getting that expansion revenue or getting people to sign up. The only thing with that is you will get some pushback. There's always folks like, Oh, I just want to pay $29 a month, like for life. It's like, great, that's fine. Go use one of the competitors and they're probably not going to make any updates.
Amar:But if you want to sign up for something that's going to grow with you, the expectation is we're going to do the work. And so that's probably like the biggest thing. For us, that combined with simplicity, right? So for us, what we discovered when we went really deep into ZenMate is the value of ZenMate is derived directly from the number of appointments that are in the system. Because every single appointment in the system, we save them more time for each additional.
Amar:So that's what we found. But the problem is that most maid service owners don't know how many appointments they have a month. Plus the appointments per month are variable. So if they come to the pricing page and you go, Oh, you have 400 to 500 appointments a month. Now you're making them think, hang on, how many appointments?
Amar:Is that how many recurring clients I have? Or how many total appointments? Or what do they say? And so the whole thing is, that's why we actually were like, okay, what's the closest metric that's reflective of that. Everyone knows how many employees they have.
Amar:And the more employees you have, the more appointments that you're likely going to have on the schedule. And so that was the metric that we ended up on. And so now what we're actually looking at is for this year, we're looking at a combination of things. So we're looking at releasing quarterly pricing to help improve like our cash flows, because we don't want to do like annual because most of our customers won't sign up for it because they don't have the cash flows for it. But the other thing is we're looking at doing usage based plus features now.
Amar:And so now it's like, we know, okay, if someone has over 10 cleaners, then like certain features are going to be much more valuable to them than other ones. So we're going to put that on like on the higher plan. Now each one, now if they've got 10 instead of $9 per employee, maybe we can get it up to $14 per employee. And so now we're at that stage where like we want to keep growing. Honestly, the pricing has a bigger difference.
Amar:It makes a bigger difference than anything else. Said we changed in January 2019. I did the math in 2020. I did the math at some point. If we had not changed our pricing in January 2019, we would have ended that year at $48,000 per month.
Amar:And because we changed the pricing, we ended up, I think, at $63,000 a month. So that
Charlie:It might have cussed out again. Yeah. Let me just tell him when he's back. Okay.
Amar:Sorry about that. I just switched my switch to my hotspot on my phone. Yeah. Anyways, I was just saying it's about a $15,000 difference between those two, and at that size, that was about 25% of our business. Gotcha.
Charlie:No, that's great. Any other questions from anyone else? No? Awesome. Is there anything else that you think while you're here that like you want you want us to share or a question you wish people ask, but they don't?
Amar:That question, Charlie, that's the question that people I don't actually know. I guess one thing that think is interesting to just touch on really quickly is I just think it's interesting, the difference for me now that the company is a lot more mature versus when it was very early on. I think that's something that I'd have to remind myself of. It's difficult to spend time talking to your customers. I was essentially my full time job at the beginning which is why you hear me talking about it a lot because not enough people like to do that but it's difficult.
Amar:It's a tough one to balance if you're working a full time job, if you're working on the product at the same time. Just think that people need to be one piece of advice that I feel like doesn't really come up enough that I wish that more people considered or whatever is I wish that more indie hackers looked for non technical solutions to problems. I think that everyone looks at how do you code something up and oftentimes there's some better way or the other thing is stopping for a second and going does this need to be automated? I catch the Zen Made team on that where someone goes, Hey, need to write a process for this thing. And it happens once a year or something.
Amar:Or maybe that's not one of the best sort of suggestion because for a company like Zen Made, actually that makes it more important because the one person leaves, you don't realize for eleven months and then something's completely broken. But at lower level, remember when folks were trying to spend time automating, they're like, Yeah, we can spend two days on this and it'll automate this and make the customer's life easier. Hang on a second, but we can make the customer's life easier by having a VA do that and we get two of those like a day. It takes them no time to do at all and we get back two days of development time to then focus on stuff. I think that more indie hackers need to be thinking about that.
Amar:Whatever you're thinking like, God forbid, that matters to anyone paying you like money, it's not about adding dark mode and how long it's going to take. It's about the opportunity cost and what else you could be doing in that time. And it's not about that one task. It's about the 50 or 100 tasks that are like that. Well, it happens with every new ZenMate employee, what do you mean you just spent like an extra day getting the animation right?
Amar:Like you do that again, I'll fire you. I don't care about the animation. Get it done for the customer, fix it. You know what I mean? I think that's something that people need to have more of a mindset of around like moving faster.
Charlie:No, I couldn't agree more. And I think we'll make this the last question from Adrian on what habits were useful in your journey.
Amar:The most useful habit was from the it was introduced to me by the foundation, probably comes from like a bunch of other things, just the 20 mile march, which is just essentially talking about just working every single day and just being consistent. So for me, the first two years, I did not have a good work ethic. I would skimp out on things. My co founder would ask me to do things and I wouldn't. When things changed, we're a couple of conversations that we had, stuff like that.
Amar:The biggest thing was that I essentially just started waking up every single day and I'm a morning person. So for me, everything was like, was done like in the morning. And it was like, I would always have my call list ready to go up. Here's like the 10 calls that I have to make in the morning before I go into work, like in San Francisco. And then like separate of that, would spend five or ten minutes just doing one thing that would add to the business long term, like adding one email into our email sequence.
Amar:Okay, I wrote that one email and now everyone that joins our email list gets that email. And I just focus on doing one thing a day like that. And you stack that up when it comes to like marketing tasks and an email funnel and like building landing pages and all of that. And I just stacked little tasks like that for two years. And by the end of it, it's, Oh my God, we actually do marketing, but I'm not really having to do all that much work.
Amar:Of course, that was just the start of all the work, but you know what I mean. So that habit is probably by far the biggest thing. And then the second one, which is more digital nomads, specific time zones. A nomads lot will almost fight time zones where they are traveling a little bit, they go to a different continent, and so they're like, Okay, I've got to stay up. I've got to do all these things.
Amar:Sometimes that's necessary, but oftentimes it actually gives you a different ability to focus. So just a really quick example of that is like, when I'm here in Thailand, I wake up at five in the morning and most of my team doesn't wake up until maybe 01:00 like in the afternoon. So when I'm here, I can just do deep work in my mornings, take off most of the afternoon. Then when they're up to speed in like the afternoon or the evenings, maybe I jump on a couple of calls to make sure we're on the same page or whatever. I do no customer calls while I'm here.
Amar:When I'm in The United States, then I really lean into it and I'm more active on support. I'm giving the support team feedback and doing a lot of the quality checks and making sure things are still up to the standards that I set a couple of years ago. I'll do demos. I'll jump on training calls with people. I'll do all of that stuff, Right?
Amar:In The UK, it's a little bit different, but that's another one.
Charlie:Nice one. Thanks so much for that. And I think that's a good note to end on. Amar, thanks so much for joining us. There's some incredible insights there, so super appreciate it, man.
Amar:Cool. I'll see you guys later. Thanks for having me.
Charlie:Thanks so much, Amar. Thanks, everyone, and I'll catch you all soon.