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If you’ve dreamed about building your own product, you’re in the right place. This week the hilarious, talented, and honest Allan Branch joins us to talk about why he’s leaving LessConf behind to focus on LessAccounting. Sponsors This show wouldn't be possible without these great sponsors. When you support them, you support the show! Sprint.ly has been there from the beginning. Perfect for software teams of 3 or more people, Sprint.ly is the easiest way for managers and developers to track the software development process. You and your team can try Sprint.ly for free, go to www.sprint.ly. Use the code productpeopletv2013 to get 10% off! Notable quotes "LessConf was a fun little hobby that started to take over." "With our app, we're still battling it out for users, and LessConf was becoming a distraction" "Notoriety in the startup community doesn't translate into users in the small business." "Notoriety and fame and all that bullshit feels good; it's a disease. It sucks you in… looking at Instagram likes, and who likes stuff, and re-tweets you. If startups aren't your target marketing, notoriety can be a distraction." "Running a conference is like being a bride at a wedding." "What about a social network to connect golfing buddies?" "We both took pay cuts to start LessEverything, because we wanted to build a nest-egg to build products" "Having a partner makes it better. Steve likes to make my ideas better." "A good partner will give you the courage to be more of yourself." "The ignorant user is your best customer." "There's no legacy in pixels." Show notes Allan on Twitter LessConf LessAccounting Allan and Steve's books Massalina Drive
Show Notes
If you’ve dreamed about building your own product, you’re in the right place. This week the hilarious, talented, and honest Allan Branch joins us to talk about why he’s leaving LessConf behind to focus on LessAccounting.
Sponsors
This show wouldn’t be possible without these great sponsors. When you support them, you support the show!
Sprint.ly has been there from the beginning. Perfect for software teams of 3 or more people, Sprint.ly is the easiest way for managers and developers to track the software development process. You and your team can try Sprint.ly for free, go to www.sprint.ly.
Use the code productpeopletv2013 to get 10% off!
Notable quotes
“LessConf was a fun little hobby that started to take over.”
“With our app, we’re still battling it out for users, and LessConf was becoming a distraction”
“Notoriety in the startup community doesn’t translate into users in the small business.”
“Notoriety and fame and all that bullshit feels good; it’s a disease. It sucks you in… looking at Instagram likes, and who likes stuff, and re-tweets you. If startups aren’t your target marketing, notoriety can be a distraction.”
“Running a conference is like being a bride at a wedding.”
“What about a social network to connect golfing buddies?”
“We both took pay cuts to start LessEverything, because we wanted to build a nest-egg to build products”
“Having a partner makes it better. Steve likes to make my ideas better.”
“A good partner will give you the courage to be more of yourself.”
“The ignorant user is your best customer.”
“There’s no legacy in pixels.”
Show notes
Creators and Guests
What is Product People?
A podcast focused on great products and the people who make them
Nothing we've ever done has been like, You know? There's never been and and three and a half or four years ago, we asked Jason Fried that at 03:07 signals because he had office hours, and then we called him, and we said, like, what did you do to see that, like, spike? And he was like, there's never been a spike.
Speaker 2:If you've dreamed about building your own product, you are in the right place this week. The hilarious, talented, and honest Alan Branch joins us to talk about why he's leaving less conf behind to focus on less accounting. Product people would not be possible without the support from the fine folks at sprint.ly. If you're building software with a team of people and you want to make your development process more transparent for the whole company, sprint.ly is for you. Now anyone can check-in and see what stage certain features are at.
Speaker 2:Founders and product managers can get the pulse of the whole company in one place. I want you to try Sprintly for free. Www.sprint.ly. After your trial is over, use my coupon code ProductPeopleTV2013 for 10% off. If you've always wanted to write your own eBook, join myself, Sasha Grave, Nathan Barry, and Paul Jarvis for a live hangout about self publishing on 08/26/2013.
Speaker 2:Go to www.selfpublishinghangout.com, and you can sign up there. Hi. I'm Justin, and this is product people, the podcast focused on great products and the people who make them. And this week, I'm joined by a man who builds amazing lamps, Alan Branch of Less Accounting and formerly of Less Comp. Alan, welcome to the show.
Speaker 1:Thanks for having me.
Speaker 2:I like doing intros. They're kind of fun.
Speaker 1:Sure. I thought you're gonna do like wrestler six four. Where are you gonna that's Maybe really
Speaker 2:I'll do that next time. Hey. Let's get a big question out of the way right away because a lot of people know you from LessConf. Mhmm. And I was just on your LessConf web page today, and it says you're not doing LessConf anymore.
Speaker 2:Is that true?
Speaker 1:Yeah. You can't wouldn't say forever. Right? I don't I don't like to talk in absolutes. But, yeah, we're not doing it for a while.
Speaker 1:A few years. It might happen one day. I don't know. Just kind of putting it on pause.
Speaker 2:Yeah. And what was the thinking behind that? Why why stop now?
Speaker 1:Well, we make we do make money from it, and it's very hard to make money from a conference. It got to be too much. We're kind of at a spot. We have about two fifty attendees each year, and this year, we had it was three days of continuous adventure stuff. Like, we had a circus act come in from New York to just do, like, fire breathing and juggling whenever we wanted them to.
Speaker 1:We had a party at my house. I I have a fairly large house with a yard. We had 250 people. Actually, there might be 300 when you count, like, staff and local people Yeah. At my house.
Speaker 1:I had a party here where we had knife throwing lessons and a tightrope set up. A guy broke his leg.
Speaker 2:Oh, man.
Speaker 1:A hot tub. We had ping pong. I mean, we just we had moonshine local moonshine. We had a pig roast, we had, you know, just we had marshmallow tasting, we had I mean
Speaker 2:This sounds amazing. Why would why would you stop this? This is such a good thing.
Speaker 1:Yeah. It just got to it just it it's so much it's so much fun. Right? Yeah. And it just it's such a distraction from our product, less accounting.
Speaker 1:And so it's just kind of this fun little hobby that started taking over. And we still you know, we're we're still duking it out. Right? We're we're there's no big pie. We have a nest egg of money, but there's we're not a funded company.
Speaker 1:We're still battling it out, you know, for for users and stuff unless accomplished as a big distraction. Yeah. And certainly, you can make correlations of like, Oh, well, the attendees are your potential market. It just got to be a thing where it was just we had to cut something off, and that was it. And as much as we like doing it, it just was a distraction for now.
Speaker 2:Yeah. And it that is one of those things people say is, like, if you run this event, you might get customers out of it. But was that the case for you? Like, did you ever get customers out of it?
Speaker 1:Not really. I mean, it's just not it's a nice event to go to, and you meet a lot of people, and you do a lot of goodwill and introductions, and and you can make some notoriety. But notoriety in the startup community doesn't translate to users in the real business community. I mean, our users are plumbers, surf schools, bakeries. They don't come to Leskampf.
Speaker 1:Yeah. And and so no notoriety and and and fame and all that bullshit just feels really good when you're doing it. Leskampf was this really nice ego stroke. Yeah. People coming to your party and paying to come and sponsors giving you money to be at your party, and you're there and you're just everyone will know.
Speaker 1:And it's just really big Easter. Then you you come off of Westcott, and it's just like you're sitting you're back at home working, and your friends aren't around. Petmont City is a little tiny town. Yeah. And there's not a big start up community here at all.
Speaker 1:Yeah. There's, like, six people that do that do Ruby, but, you know, it so it's a big left. So it's this rollercoaster of emotions, and it's it's very emotional playing at conference because you'll have friends that can't go for various reasons, so they don't come. And then you're at the conference as the host, and you're being pulled you wanna see as many people as you can because that's part of your job is to introduce people and talk to people. And your friends are there, and they're like, dude, come hang out.
Speaker 1:And you're like, I can't I gotta talk to all these other people that I don't know. And so it's a really weird and you're it's like being a bride at a wedding, and and everyone wants to talk to you, and you always feel like you're gonna let someone down by not talking to them. And, you know, like, this person's gonna be like, I came all the way there, and I didn't get to talk to Alan, and he was rude to me, or he said something offhanded to me. Yeah. In a moment of frustration or something, you know, I mean because I'm I'm at this event.
Speaker 1:I'm there as an as an attendee, but as an organizer. So I'm making sure, like, food shows up. And so it's like a it's like a bride planning her own wedding and then attending the wedding and having to talk to them about it.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1:And so, like, you lose sleep too. So it's it's stressful.
Speaker 2:Do you think it's worth it? Because a lot of people in our industry want kind of to get notoriety. They want to, be known for things.
Speaker 1:Sure.
Speaker 2:Do you think that's still something worth pursuing? Or do you think people get distracted by it? Is that is that kind of a false hope?
Speaker 1:I mean, like, notoriety feels really good. And I'm I'm by no means, like, famous, but I have a few people that know who the things that we've done. We've been around and only because we've been around for a long time. Long time in the web world, at least. Yeah.
Speaker 1:It's it's a yeah. It's like this it's a disease, and it sucks you in, and, like, you know, just looking at Instagram likes, and and who liked this, and who did tweet this out, and you know, and it's it's it's not good. And you certainly need notoriety to get your product out. And there's a hard balance between notoriety and marketing. It kinda gets mixed together too much.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Especially if you're building a product for developers. Yeah. And that's sort of like your skill set too. It's it's a real really weird sort of thing.
Speaker 1:But it is a distraction, at least for us. Startups are, again, not our our target market. One, because most startups aren't running their business like a business. Yeah. They're just building their product.
Speaker 1:They don't really care about accounting as opposed to someone who has a restaurant who has to really watch their margins and hit their budgets and report their taxes. Know, startups and tech especially tech startups are just not really known for good accounting.
Speaker 2:Yeah. They're not thinking about that. Well, I wanna know how you and Steve because you guys are known for being kinda nuts, like kinda wild crazy guys.
Speaker 1:Sure.
Speaker 2:How the heck did you get into accounting software?
Speaker 1:Yeah. So the the backstory of less everything is 02/2006, I was I was a designer building this doing rail stuff with a few contract developers.
Speaker 2:Okay.
Speaker 1:And I had a project go awry in 2000 fall two thousand six. And Steve had contacted me previously because I had SEO for Ruby on Rails in Jacksonville, Florida, which was I was living in Birmingham. My sister lived in Jacksonville. But so SEO brought us together. And and so he contacted me, and he was, like, $50 an hour, which for me was, like, a lot of money.
Speaker 1:That was a ton of money. And so I brought him on to kinda save the project, and he did. I was doing fixed bed. He was doing hourly, but he would push back on features that were out of scope because the client was pushing me around and say, you know, you're getting I'm charging for this time, and it's not in scope. You didn't get paid for this.
Speaker 1:And so he was the first developer that actually looked after my well-being and my best interest. And I was like, wow. This guy, he actually and he had good UI sense and was just had some nice wisdom about him. And and then, like, by the end of that year, I started throwing around ideas. Software as a service to me was a new idea.
Speaker 1:I didn't really know anything about it. I started throwing around ideas to different developers I've been working with of, hey. What about a social network connect golfing buddies?
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Shit like that. Yeah. And and I had an idea for an expense tracker, and so did Steve. And he was like, I kinda like this idea. And I was like, yeah, my uncle's a CPA.
Speaker 1:He's like, my mom's a CPA. And we just started kinda building building that in, like, the 2006. And in 02/2007, we formalized everything together and and got married, basically, is what you'd call it.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah. And been building it ever since.
Speaker 2:So what are the challenges with running a business like that? Because there is kind of a there's some some wisdom. Some people say you only should build a product for people in your niche or your kind of world. And, you know, how how do you kind of how have you built this business for, you know, for people that need accounting software, small businesses?
Speaker 1:Yeah. So small business is a is a gigantic thing. Right? It's it's any business under 500 employees. But most people's bookkeeping is fairly close.
Speaker 1:People think everyone thinks their problems problems are, like, unique snowflakes. Yeah. But it really is. And it's all, you know, revenue streams or projects, and they all can use tags. It's it's fairly I mean, when you get the people that have, like, reselling inventory and holding on to inventory and depreciating it, that's when you start getting a little bit weird.
Speaker 1:Accrual accounting is a little bit weird. The problem we face is taking the sort of simple feature set and explaining it for all the different situations people have, and then all the different sort of preconceived notions of what bookkeeping is, the baggage that QuickBooks gives you, because QuickBooks kinda teaches you this weird terminology or traditional accounting terminology that we try to unteach people. That's really what the problem that we've always faced in the past few years. And then getting in the door of accountants who use QuickBooks and have been using QuickBooks for twenty years.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:And they make money out of QuickBooks consulting and the problems that QuickBooks generates. So it's kind of this weird weird sort of cycle. But, yeah, it's we we are building a tool for ourselves. That's really the the the it started out as an expense tracker, and we moved into invoicing and proposals because that's what we needed. And at the time, we had never heard of FreshBooks.
Speaker 1:Yeah. And I don't know of any other invoicing apps. I'm sure there were hundreds, but I had never heard of any. Yeah. And so we really just built features as we need As less accounts as less everything has grown from Steve and I paying ourselves $3 a month each, which is what we were paying ourselves, nothing, to multiple millions of dollars, and our accountant will say, You need to move to QuickBooks because you've got to run less accounting.
Speaker 1:We'll say, how do what what do you mean? And they'll say, well, you need to add depreciation or a balance sheet. We'll say, well, tell us how we can do that, or tell us what do you mean, and we'll figure it out. And so we built it from, like, you know, the ground up as opposed to MBA trying to figure out how to build software.
Speaker 2:Yeah. And so it's kinda scaled with you guys as you've grown as a business.
Speaker 1:Exactly. Exactly.
Speaker 2:Okay. There's a few different places I wanna go here. The first is you mentioned that you guys were paying each each other $3,000 a month. Where did that money come from while you're building this product?
Speaker 1:Oh, okay. So we we did that so 2007 when we formed, I had a few leftover clients, and Steve had a couple clients that needed continuing work. We had more clients coming in the shoot, but we said, what can we afford to pay ourselves? Because I I was making, like, $60 a year or something as a freelancer, basically. And I don't even remember what he was making, but we both kinda took pay cuts to to form with everything because we wanna build up a nest egg.
Speaker 1:Mhmm. But we never really took off time to work on less accounting. It was always I mean, immediately when we form less everything, we started getting work. The first year of less everything we did, 2,007, we did, like, 600,000 in client work and built less accounting. And so we were we were doing client work and and staying up late at night to work on less accounting or hiring people to work on less accounting.
Speaker 1:We did that for years. Less accounting, I would say it was 2,009 before I was making, like, $5 a month. Okay. So it was years of years of work. Yes.
Speaker 1:That's the misconception is, like, it's just gonna start raining money on you. Yeah. In reality, we are the cockroach in the accounting industry. Like, we just won't you can't kill us. You know?
Speaker 1:Like, there's been plenty of competition come and go, new invoicing apps, little little accounting app things pop up, and they'll they just can't outlast us. They'll they'll burn through money. They'll get bored. They'll they won't see a hockey stick. They'll switch to something else, and we just keep trudging along.
Speaker 2:Yeah. And how did you guys have families at that point when you were starting this thing and you had your how did you do that? $3,000 a month? Like, how how did you explain that to your spouse? How did you how did you explain that to your kids?
Speaker 1:So I had very low expenses. You know, I had my my son was born 02/2006. So I had one kid kind of brand new child, sparkly and brand and shiny. Yeah. Brand new child.
Speaker 1:Steve had three. He's got two daughters and a son, and his son is, like, three months younger than my son. But I would say we only pay ourselves $3 a month for a few months.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:We we ramped up pretty quick. When you're making 600,000 or we're bringing in 600,000 a year in consulting work, you end up you know, we went from 3 to 4 to 5,000, 6,000, $7,000 a month. And we made really good money for a few years when we did. We were we were really pushing hard on the consultancy unless accounting kinda drug around drug its feet 2,000 oh, 2,009, 2,010, it kinda drug its feet a little bit because we were busy doing consulting work and making a bunch of money.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Is that a good way is that a good way to do it when you're starting? Like
Speaker 1:Oh, man. I would no. No. It's well, it's just it's hard to juggle all those things. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Like, not nothing that I've done, I would say, you should do it the way we did it. Yeah. Because it seems like you know, I think that's maybe maybe that maybe most business owners kinda come this front of they have it all figured out, and they have the right path. And I think like, oh, man. Why?
Speaker 1:This has been freaking so hard. You should do whatever the opposite of what I did. Whatever that is
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:It's probably easier than what I did. Yeah. I I think, you know, in 2008 the 2008, we had $260,000 in cash left over after the of the year. That's been sold. And what we should have done is fired everybody.
Speaker 1:And he's been like and I talked to Steve. We we had a conversation. We said we could fire everybody. And you and I just work in Westlake County for a full year that would support us. Yeah.
Speaker 1:And it was like, wow. All the you're you're drunk on the money. Yeah. And you're drunk on some of the notoriety. And and, you know, hunkering down and kinda going quiet for a year isn't it's not really fun to your ego.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Know? I'm building this consultancy and everyone talking about you and releasing open source stuff. It's fun.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:And so we we did. We kept consulting through those years, and we basically worked I think it was 02/2009, Steve worked, like, twenty five hundred hours in that year. And, I mean, literally, days a week, seven days a week, we were working all night. And it would be I remember at one point apologizing because I was going to bed at, like, 11:00 at night. Yeah.
Speaker 1:And just being like, I gotta go to bed, dude. I'm tired. And Steve was like, I almost step in another few hours. And we just worked our brains out. And, you know, our relations with our wives suffered, and our kids were young, thankfully.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Our health suffered. You know, we weren't exercising. It was just working constantly Yeah. And drinking lots of coffee.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1:So I don't I don't recommend that. I I would recommend cutting all your expenses down as little as possible, doing as much consulting work as you possibly at the highest rate you can, and just and going just full blown on the on the product when you have enough cash. Yeah. And enough cash is like three months. Three months worth of cash.
Speaker 2:Do do you think that advice is the same for someone with a family as opposed to someone who's single and no dependents? And like is it a lot easier to cut down on your expenses if you don't have kids and a mortgage?
Speaker 1:Oh, certainly. Kids certainly make it harder and a wife makes it harder. Well, if you have kids and no wife, that's harder. A wife so you know what I'm saying? But a wife and kids certainly, and he's just like, parent.
Speaker 1:Now him and his wife got divorced, and it's hard. You know? You have to go pick kids in school and stuff and, like, things parent teacher conferences. You know? With me, I'm like, yeah.
Speaker 1:Just go. I'm I'm not gonna look. But, yeah, and certainly having kids is harder. I mean oh, yeah. Having kids is harder, especially when they get older, and they can, like, look at you and say, like, you work too much.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:My my kid the other day said, daddy, you work too much, but you can take Father's Day So but he doesn't you know, he was a baby when I was working seventy hours a week. I only work, like, forty five hours a week at the most now.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. So Does having a partner help with all that?
Speaker 1:I think so. So Steve likes it to make my ideas better or tell me they're terrible. He also and that's the kind of the common what everyone's gonna tell you is like, Oh, your business partner will tell you when your ideas are bad. But they'll also give you the courage to be more of yourself. Mhmm.
Speaker 1:I remember when Steve and I first got together, I thought I told him, we should get Polar shirts with our names imported on, like the logo imported on the Polar shirts. He was like, No, dude. That's terrible. You should I like the way you're doing this other thing over here, and he encouraged me to be more of myself.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1:I I had an art teacher in high school that kinda did that too. And so they're there to, like, make you more courageous to to to go after the big ideas or the bigger ideas or the crazier ideas and then and and pop your ego when I need to too.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Or with business partners, I don't you know, think I would be successful with Steve or whatever that means, whatever success means without Steve. But he's certainly I'm way better with him than I am without him.
Speaker 2:Yeah. And how'd you know he was the right guy?
Speaker 1:How'd you know your wife was the right one? It was like the look those like love bells. Yeah. No. You know, he he he he looked after my best interest in the projects.
Speaker 1:He just had a lot of I would bring him a problem or something, and I thought I had the answer to it. And he would say even as a contractor, he was like, no. You should do it this way. And I'm like, oh, what? And then his kind of personality and and patience for certain things kinda meld well with mine.
Speaker 1:Like, he could read contracts and stuff, and I'm like, oh god. I don't wanna read anything like that. And
Speaker 2:he just
Speaker 1:and so he just and he, like, he likes it. Yeah. And so our our skill sets you know, he's a developer. I'm more of a designer, more of marketing, and we kinda share UI sensibilities. But it just it just seemed to kinda be the right thing.
Speaker 1:It never in this business have I ever been, like, you know, like, master plan kinda thing. It's always just kinda felt right kind of thing. Like, oh, that doesn't really make it kind of makes sense for the business but kind of just feels right.
Speaker 2:Yes.
Speaker 1:And so Steve just it just felt right towards me, Steve.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Now, so who who is less accounting for? Like, what do you have a typical kind of customer that Sure. That signs up and is like, this is our customer?
Speaker 1:Sure. So usually, they're service based people. So they send invoices. Usually, they have more than three employees or more than three contractors. Usually, people that have less than $200,000 in revenue, they don't really care about their books or use a spreadsheet or something.
Speaker 1:They just can't justify the time, any time to do accounting Yeah. Or bookkeeping. And then that's about it, really. I mean, there's I mean, we're mostly service providers, marketing people, design firms, stuff like that. But, you know, we're moving over to more general public people.
Speaker 1:Like, I talked to a guy the other day. He was like, I I repair moorings on sailboats, which are, like, boat anchors.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Permanent boat anchors. And I was like, moorings? And there was, like, surf schools and stuff. So we're we're kind of breaking out of this sort of tech sort of bubble. Why why
Speaker 2:are you doing that? Why break out of the tech bubble? Why go outside of that circle?
Speaker 1:It's just naturally gone that way. We we we don't really spend any money on marketing, but it just kinda trickled that way. You know, that's just the where the the organic marketing has gone. Those are better clients because they're not on the Internet all the time. Like, they don't, you know, they're not gonna, like they don't know every option out there.
Speaker 1:You know, as sad as it sounds, an ignorant user is your best customer Yeah. Because they're not trying out every application. They're not, like, outlining every one of them or telling you where your API is wrong or bad or you know? Yeah. So, you know, I love when plumbers sign up because plumbers don't go out, you know, looking for new accounting software every three months.
Speaker 2:That's right.
Speaker 1:You know? So
Speaker 2:So how do you reach plumbers? Like, what's what's been an effective way of you doing some marketing and and reading and reaching people? I mean, know you said you don't do marketing, but Yeah. How do you how do
Speaker 1:you reach those marketing. We don't do paid advertising. Yeah. We do a little bit of retargeting stuff, but not I mean, a $100 a week kinda stuff. Nothing major.
Speaker 1:Just being really good to accountants has been good for us. Okay. By being good to accountants, I mean, when I see an accountant sign up, we'll email them. We'll hey, can we show you the can we screen check? We do a demo of the app for you.
Speaker 1:It takes five minutes. Really, it takes fifteen. We just tell them it takes five. And so talking to them and just being nice to them, and then even because people are always needing accountant referrals. If there's an accountant that I like, I'll refer a customer lead to them.
Speaker 1:And then instantly, they're loyal to us for a long time. Yeah. So just being good to account accountants are the gatekeeper to business owners in a lot of lot of circumstances. And just you know, we've been around, like, we've been around for six years. And so six years were the lengths.
Speaker 1:Right? It's it's Yeah. Less accounting has steadily grown. I mean and by grown, I mean, 10 to 15% every year. Not like month over month Yeah.
Speaker 1:Year by year Yeah. Which to a funded startup is like death. Yeah. But for us, it's like, you know, we we run ourselves like a normal business. Normal business is 10% growth is really good.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:And so just being around for that long has built up links. It's built up people know. People you know, when authors write an article on accounting software, we're somehow found from various links and Googling and Gotcha. Yeah. All that kind of stuff.
Speaker 1:Yeah. So
Speaker 2:Is there like do you do a lot of content marketing? Like, there been some content marketing that's really worked for you?
Speaker 1:We just started doing content marketing here in the past six months. I'm not a I'm not a huge nothing like, I'm not like, you gotta do content marketing. We blogged for a lot of years on lesseverything.com and built up that sort of traffic. Yeah. That didn't help less account.
Speaker 1:Yeah. And so we started blogging under Less Accountings. This blog about six months ago. Yeah. And so the most kind of content marketing I will do is I will take a blog post that I'm thinking about writing and just doing some keyword research on it.
Speaker 1:Or I will look through support tickets to see people asking about that are not about features, but about how they're running their business. And I'll write a blog post based off of our experiences that I've already had
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:As a consultant, and I'll write a blog post about that. We've done ebooks and things like that too, but none of it was like, oh, we should launch this book that'll give us a lot of traffic because of these keywords. It was never like that. It was, what do we know about? We know about relationships with our wives and our our business partners.
Speaker 1:Let's write an ebook about that because that's interesting.
Speaker 2:Yeah. And
Speaker 1:people ask us about that. It's never like some master plan. And so it so I don't write blog posts that are like 10 ways to improve your business. Yeah. Or nine ways, you know, Shawshank Redemption is like being a business owner.
Speaker 1:I
Speaker 2:wanna see that post now. Yeah. You wanna deliver on that one.
Speaker 1:I don't wanna do that kind of stuff. I just I can't handle that. I like writing short little blog posts, something actionable.
Speaker 2:And do you do you actually get conversions on, like, blog posts? Do you get conversions on the book? Like, do you actually get customers from those things?
Speaker 1:So we wrote a little primer that was like a primer called bookkeeping for service based businesses in five minutes or something. And we have a coupon code at back of that ebook, and that converts pretty well. Pretty well, I mean, a user once a week, once every two weeks. Nothing like there's nothing we've ever done has been like, you know?
Speaker 2:Yes.
Speaker 1:There's never been and and three and a half or four years ago, we asked Jason Freed that at thirty seven signals. Yeah. Because he had office hours, and then we called him, and we said, like, what did you do to see that, like, spike? He was like, have you never been a spike? Yeah.
Speaker 1:And so you just do stuff and just putting stuff out there, And you look for a little return on investment, but a lot of times, you can't track it. You know, are are we what we look for return is, did the revenue go up at all? And did support tickets go down or up? You know? That's how I look for UI kind of cues if we're doing things better or worse.
Speaker 1:Yeah. And that's pretty much been there's never been one thing. It's never been like, you gotta do retargeting. You gotta do content development. You gotta do SEO.
Speaker 1:Yeah. It's just kinda like you you do the best you can and put out things put out lots and lots of things for six years. Yeah.
Speaker 2:And just keep going.
Speaker 1:And just keep doing it.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Well, this would be a good time because, you know, people daydream about building their own businesses all the time. What are the kind of most common misconceptions you see people have when they're saying, I wanna build my own thing. I'm gonna be my own boss. What what what are some things that keep coming up over and over again that are just bullshit?
Speaker 1:Well, with nontech people, they don't realize they're building you'll have a business owner that's building a a piece of software that doesn't realize they're now a software company. That's from this that's from nontech people. Tech people, they don't have the patience. You know, it takes a long ass time to build revenue. Bad habits have a lot of inertia.
Speaker 1:Because so if you're like, oh, we're this thing that's replacing a bad habit, whatever that is. Bad habits have a lot of inertia. Bad software has a lot of inertia. People use QuickBooks even when they know there's better options.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Right? Everything has a lot of inertia. So it takes a and people will sign up for less accounting, and they'll delete their account. They'll come back the next year. So it's everything's so long tail and so slow, and people don't have patience.
Speaker 2:Mhmm.
Speaker 1:And that's what you that's what people don't realize how much patience you have to have to get revenue.
Speaker 2:How long did it take for you guys to become profitable?
Speaker 1:I don't really know how to answer that because we never really lived off of Lesser County's revenue until like 02/2011.
Speaker 2:Okay. So this is pretty new.
Speaker 1:Well, we had, you know, 11 people in the company. Mhmm. So there there at one point, there was, you know for the past five years, there was always someone working on a consulting project.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:You know, whether it's one person or or the whole team. We just kind of slowly worked people out of the consultancy and still and and even now even now, you know, because we're an unfunded company and there's no big huge money bag laying around, there's there's there's a cash pad, but there's not like a money bag of just like, let's spend money. Yeah. If a client came if someone came to us and said, you know, $300 an hour to do some UI work for a month, I would say, let's do it. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Because I would love that little injection of cash to do some other old things with. Right? I think
Speaker 2:I think that's actually kind of the the dirty secret of a lot of SaaS businesses Yeah. Is because I I talk to a lot of people and kinda like off camera, even some funded startups say, you know, I can't tell anyone about this, but we're doing consulting work on the side. We're we're trying to, you know, hustle as much as we can to keep money in the door. And a lot of people don't know that. They have this idea that we're just gonna build this app and it's gonna magically support us for the rest of our lives.
Speaker 1:Well, and when you build an app, that actually increases your leads because people are signing up for it. Josh Pickford at PupSurvey and temper.io, a good friend of ours, awesome, smart dude, he he got his last client lead because of he was signing up for pop survey, and they just started chatting via customer support. Yeah. And so and and also, if you use that product right in the sales process, that'll actually help sell your consultancy over other consultancies. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Because you'll say, hey, you're you want me to build a web app for you while I'm doing it for myself already, and why would you pick another consultancy that's not doing it?
Speaker 2:Yeah. Exactly.
Speaker 1:Right? Is there are they too scared to do it? You know, why would you trust them? You know? So and you can say things like, well, we've done things with marketing.
Speaker 1:We've done things with customer support. We know how to build a customer support team. Does this other consultancy know how to do that? Can they help you with that?
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Breaking away from consultancy is really hard too because the money is really good, and it's fun. And also, about this. We worked on Winston County for six years. That's a long road. And so having that break of consultancy work, a new client, a fresh code base, simple features is nice.
Speaker 1:Yeah. And so, yeah, a lot of a lot of people that call themselves SaaS businesses are still doing consulting work, and we would too. If a if a client came in and and or a lead came in and said, hey. I got $300 an hour or something. Yeah.
Speaker 1:We would, you know, we would do it.
Speaker 2:You do it. Yeah. So what's what's next for Less Accounting? What do you guys what's kind of like the next big challenge you've gotta you've gotta overcome?
Speaker 1:There's no like, there's no major there's a couple integrations we're trying to work on. There's not there's no big major sort of like rush, rush, rush to get out. And we all I like the past few months have been kind of interesting for us. We we we kind we, you know, we've always tried to, like, compare ourselves and go after, like, Xero. Xero is a funded company.
Speaker 1:Right? They're xero.com, xer0.com. They are a publicly traded company in New Zealand. Yeah. And it took them up until last year to to finally have more more users than we did.
Speaker 1:And and we were just like, wow. We gotta we gotta beat them. We gotta do better than them. And then about May, we just said, you know what? We don't we don't have to own the market, and and we're not going to, and we can't because they've spent a $170,000,000.
Speaker 1:Right? That's kind of ridiculous for us. Yeah. We're like we're like 11 people.
Speaker 2:$170,000,000 will take out a lot of plumbers, man.
Speaker 1:They have 500 employees. Right? And so it's like, we can't you know, my happiness has always been based off of my expectation of myself. And that trickle down to my expectation of other people in the in the company and just everything. And so, you know, we're we're a profitable SaaS company, and and we can carve out our little niche and just and and just trudge along, and this is great.
Speaker 1:Yeah. But we've kinda had to adjust our level of expectation in the past few months. And because it's really disheartening to kind of compare yourself to companies that are just burning money. Yeah. And it's like and they might burn themselves out.
Speaker 1:Who knows what their life but when people say, why should I use you guys over zero or Wave Accounting is another one? Yeah. I I I can only say that we're profitable. We'll be here in ten years.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. Exactly.
Speaker 1:I don't know how long they'll be here. Maybe they'll be here forever. They can be here forever too. I don't need I don't need the whole market to make a living and and be happy.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:It's lowering the bar and just kinda being realistic with what success is.
Speaker 2:Yeah. So why don't we end on this? What with all this stuff we talked about, because because business is hard, building stuff is hard, maintaining stuff is hard, customer support is hard. What keeps you going? Why do you keep doing this?
Speaker 1:Well, being a business owner, doing less accounting, what what what do you mean?
Speaker 2:Yeah. What keeps you going doing less accounting? What's the why do you why do you keep working on it? What's the what drives you to get out of bed and and work on that product?
Speaker 1:Sure. Well, there there are things that like, it's we we have not we haven't delivered the solution that we want to deliver. And partially because the kind of the aim has changed from features to that just do bookkeeping that are more like collaboration features between accountants and business owners and business partners. But we we're not satisfied with this accounting yet. So there are features that we're implementing, want to implement.
Speaker 1:There's there's still a road map that we're really excited about. And and I like connecting with business owners, as cheesy as that sounds. Like, the vast majority I gotta help out with customer support, especially on Fridays and Mondays. And, like, the vast majority of it, it's fun. It's nice.
Speaker 1:They're nice people. And then they see the cofounder responding, and they're like, nice. They don't realize how small of a company we are. Yeah. They'll be like, oh, that's so cool.
Speaker 1:And I'm like, oh, that's cool. And I'm glad you like our software. That's cool that you like our software.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Right? And it's like and, like, it's it's it's a genuine, like, appreciation. Like, we had a a person cancel their account yesterday. They've been with us for five years. And, like, I was like, fuck.
Speaker 1:Five years. That's five years. Yeah. Thank you. Like, seriously.
Speaker 1:Like, I don't I don't marginalize, like, your money is the reason why I'm at home in my gym shorts.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Like, thank you.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:You know? And, you know, it's and I we run this company. Like, I get to do whatever I want. Like, not just like I don't get to, like, delete databases and, you know, it's not like do whatever I want doesn't mean, like, being retarded or being retarded. Let's bleep that out.
Speaker 1:Being stupid or foolish. It's it's like, you know, when I do customer support, I'll say like you know, someone say like, hey. Can you help me? And I'll say like, oh, I'm fueled with coffee. I'm ready to help you.
Speaker 1:Let's do it. Or, you know, just something just like Yeah. You know? And it's fun just being ourselves. Right?
Speaker 1:We put new art every week on the login page of Los Angeles. Have a new artist that we find on the Internet. So it's it's not like I'm, like, doing the same thing every day. Like, it's be it's not I have a great job. I have a really great job.
Speaker 1:Like, my family owns car washing, which is not a great job. It's terrible. Yeah. You clean out dirty cars all day
Speaker 2:and Yeah.
Speaker 1:The heat. We have really great jobs. Our bar our bar success is no longer way up here. It's right here. We're still kind of going towards it.
Speaker 1:We there there are things we wanna accomplish, but have a great job. So every day I wake up, and I'm like, I'm excited about I'm ex I'm not gonna say every day because that's bullshit. No one's ever excited about every day I work. Yeah. But the vast majority of days, I wake up, and I'm like, there's this thing I didn't do yesterday that I'm really excited about doing today.
Speaker 1:Yeah. And not every day and everything we do is peaches and cream. But I have a great job. I do what I I do what I feel is right. Yeah.
Speaker 1:And it's a good time.
Speaker 2:Right on, man. Well, thanks so much for being on the show. This was fun. We're gonna have to do this again sometime.
Speaker 1:Absolutely. Anytime.
Speaker 2:Right on. Where can people find you on the web?
Speaker 1:Oh, on the web. Lessaccounting.com.
Speaker 2:Definitely.
Speaker 1:Twitter, Allen Branch. I make lamps. You mentioned that in the intro. Yeah. I make that's that's my hobby.
Speaker 1:You know, pixels are not really that fun. There's a there's a legacy in picture pixels. So building lamps is what I do for fun.
Speaker 2:And what's
Speaker 1:masalina the website for drive.com. There's only like two lamps in there now. I'm kinda sold out, but
Speaker 2:Right on, man.
Speaker 1:It's it's a fun hobby. Fun hobby.
Speaker 2:Cool. Thanks again.
Speaker 1:Good talking to you.
Speaker 2:Thanks again to Alan for coming on the show. I really appreciated his honest insight into what it really takes to run a business and build a product. You can follow me on Twitter at m I Justin. You can follow the show on Twitter as well at product people TV. You can also email us at productpeople@bizbox.ca.
Speaker 2:And please check out our sponsors, Sprintly, www.sprint.ly. And join Sasha Graef, Nathan Barry, Paul Jarvis, and myself for a live hangout about self publishing on 08/26/2013, www.selfpublishinghangout.com. Thanks again for listening. We'll see you next week.