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The Dreamfuel Show is a research expedition to uncover and unpack the mindsets of impactful tech founders and executives. On this show, we’re going to get real and talk about what was actually going on in their hearts and minds during the harrowing journeys that forged them and their companies! We’ll also speak with performance experts who will share the latest tips, tools, and tricks that can help us realize our own dreams, too.
As we like to say at Dreamfuel, every quarter is a hero’s journey. So be sure to hit follow to join us along the way.
Clayton Thompson [00:00:00]:
Setting clear boundaries and direction and vision from the beginning is something you have to do and you don't do that when you're friends. You just say, hey, we're going to go out there, we're going to kill it. We're going to win the world. And maybe you do that, but there comes a point in time at which it gets very serious and it's just very important who you choose as a partner.
Kevin Bailey [00:00:17]:
I'm Kevin Bailey, CEO of Dreamfuel, and this show honors founders who are stepping through fire on their quests to realize their dreams. We dive into their failures and successes and the mental performance skills they're using to achieve their goals and less time and with less frustration. Enjoy The Dreamfuel Show.
Kevin Bailey [00:00:37]:
Hey everyone, welcome to The Dreamfuel Show. Today I've got Clayton Thompson here with me. Clayton is a CEO, founder, he's founded multiple SaaS startups. He's been in the industry for almost 15 years and he's got some great stories to share. A lot of great success. First ask company was my net wire. He was in it for over twelve years before he sold his stake. And then he's founded a member management software company called Membershine, which is growing very rapidly.
Kevin Bailey [00:01:03]:
Won't put numbers out there, but a high growth SaaS company. And he's here to talk a little about his journey. So welcome to the show, Clayton.
Clayton Thompson [00:01:10]:
Thanks for having me, Kevin, I really appreciate it.
Kevin Bailey [00:01:12]:
Yeah, man. So Clayton and I, as you've probably heard in the last few shows, just did some pretty powerful somatic breath work. So about eight minutes of deep breathing. It was the first time he'd ever done it before. So, curious your thoughts on the breath work, Clayton?
Clayton Thompson [00:01:25]:
As you said, I've never done that before and there's always some hesitancy for things that you're not necessarily a deep believer in. Right? So when I hear that breath work, maybe I think to myself, how's that going to help someone like myself? I don't, I can't envision myself doing these. But immediately, you know, you walked me through what I was going to experience and I didn't, I honestly didn't even believe that was going to happen. I thought, well, I'm the exception. I'm the anomaly. Exactly what you described is exactly what happened. So I could see, I can see some, some real value in the breath work. And I was a fan of you walking me through it and thank you for that.
Kevin Bailey [00:02:00]:
Awesome. Yeah, so we do breath work at the beginning of the Dreamfield show just to help founders and CEO's get relaxed and get in a calm state of mind, or they kind of speak from the heart about some of their journeys. And I know Clayton has had quite a few. So, Clayton, the first question I had for you, I'd like you to share a story about being a founder or CEO that was highly impactful for you and maybe taught you a few things you wanted to share on the show.
Clayton Thompson [00:02:23]:
The hardest and biggest, most painful experiencer that impacted me the most is going to be when we first started the previous company. We went in this together as friends and founders, and I would advise against that. I would advise against starting a company with a friend. Decisions are going to be made down the road that are going to impact you, and some of the hardest decisions I've never had to make. You have to draw a line on the friendship at some point. At one point you're going to have to say, for the health of the company, we have to make these decisions. And, you know, you may not have the same values and visions and where the company's headed. You need to choose your partners very wisely.
Clayton Thompson [00:03:05]:
And the second time around, I chose a couple different partners. We were friends, but we weren't real close friends, and we all brought different skill sets to the table. And, and though we're all kind of starting to do different things, it worked. And so what I learned is definitely choose your partners extremely wisely. When you're going to start a business, you can do it by yourself, fine. But you're going to be lonely. As you and I were talking about earlier, who do you go to with questions? Who do you go to? Comments? I mean, it's lonely sitting here building a product when you're spending 8100, $300,000, in our case, on an MVP. And you just don't know people who have ever done that before, especially in the Indianapolis tech space.
Clayton Thompson [00:03:48]:
Right? There's very few of those individuals. And if you don't have good founders around to talk, you're sitting in the corner by yourself. So that's what I can share in that regard.
Kevin Bailey [00:03:58]:
Great share, Clayton. My first tech company I founded with my high school buddies, and there were some pros and certainly some cons to it later. Tech companies, you know, I've, I've founded, well, dream fuel is founded now with close friends. So my co founder, I didn't know before starting it. What do you think are some of the primary pitfalls of founding a company with your friends?
Clayton Thompson [00:04:16]:
Well, I'll use my first company as an example. So I've got nothing but nice things to say about that individual, even though it may have not ended on the greatest of terms. He had set out with a vision for what he wanted to do. He was a majority owner. I was a minority, was 55 45 split, but he was still a majority owner. It was his vision, his baby, and he wanted it to be a lifestyle company. And about halfway through growth, about six years into it, you know, I didn't know anything about sales and marketing, and I realized we were doing so well, but I realized that we would reach a point where we at a lifestyle company on a monthly basis, we would have sign up, maybe, let's say 40 clients a month. Eventually we'd be losing 40 clients a month.
Clayton Thompson [00:04:59]:
And that lifestyle company, when working where we would stay stagnant. And I went to him and I said, hey, look, we need to figure out how to go into adjacent markets or add more to our services or all these different things. And he just was not interested in being a sales and marketing growth company. He wanted it to be a lifestyle company. And we fought. And so the hardest pitfalls were coming in and trying to tell him after the fact that, do you want this company to have long term success and the people below us to advance their careers? We have to make changes. And the hardest part was trying to convince someone otherwise. So I think saying clear boundaries and direction and vision from the beginning is something you have to do.
Clayton Thompson [00:05:38]:
And you don't do that when you're friends. You just say, hey, we're going to go out there. We're going to kill it. We're going to win the world. And maybe you do that, but there comes a point in time of which it gets very serious and it's just very important who you choose as a partner. So that's, that was my, those were my pitfalls. And again, I say that with the highest respect for the individual involved.
Kevin Bailey [00:05:54]:
Okay, so I'm hearing what you're saying. Basically, long story short, hard to set clear and fast boundaries with friends.
Clayton Thompson [00:06:01]:
That's right. Absolutely. Much more eloquent way of putting it.
Kevin Bailey [00:06:05]:
Id agree. I appreciate sharing, man.
Clayton Thompson [00:06:07]:
Thank you.
Kevin Bailey [00:06:08]:
Whats another story that you think founders maybe who are early, early stage or maybe in the first couple of years of you making my net wire, whats another story youd want to share to those people who really need to hear?
Clayton Thompson [00:06:20]:
Yeah, whats a story id like to share with early stage founders? So I kind of look at my first go around at building a company through membership. My net wire was, was pretty easy. We put the product out there on the Internet people found it and they bought it. We did a great job of customer service and making sure that they were taken care of through this company. You know, I've had to learn so much. I was basically starting over from scratch. I had to go out and meet developers. I had to go out and meet lawyers.
Clayton Thompson [00:06:46]:
I had to go out and figure out how to fundraise. I had to go out and just all these different vendors and situations and a good story or some good advice for early stage founders, or surround yourself with the right people. I wrote a post about this, I think, last week where I listed off all these individuals who have helped me over the past couple of years, how much faster I would have went had I been introduced to a person like Roger Schumann or a Jeb banner or a DJ Mueller. Right. These individuals are key to getting you into the right networking groups. I've never met anyone in this growth through Membershine where I asked for help and they, they didn't give me a time of day. Right. Like, that's something that the mid, there's a Midwest attitude where these individuals are absolutely willing to extend a hand and give you even 30 minutes of their time to help get you in the right direction.
Clayton Thompson [00:07:34]:
So what is key when you're starting a startup and learn from my mistakes is not isolating yourself and not locking yourself in the room. I'm terrible at networking. No one knows who I am. No one's going to watch this podcast when you say Clay Thompson, because no one knows who I am. I know how to build business, execute, and grow, but I don't get out and network. And that's absolutely something I wish I would have learned earlier in my, in my career. And so now I'm starting to get out there and do that a little bit, and it's paying dividends. So my advice would be to get out there and make connections.
Kevin Bailey [00:08:09]:
Hey, it's Kevin, and I hope you're enjoying the show. I know it's tough out there right now for tech leaders, and we appreciate you taking the time to focus on your mental performance and well being. Speaking of time, did you know that 76% of tech leaders lose 20 or more hours of productivity a week due to stress, fatigue, and feeling overwhelmed? To win these hours back, leaders need to learn the mental performance skills that keep you in the zone, where research shows that executives are five times more productive. And that's where we come in. Dreamfuel's octane cohort is our flagship mental performance program built for tech leaders under pressure who want to achieve their most ambitious goals in less time and with less frustration. To learn more, go to dreamfuel.com/octane or just click the link in the description to see if you qualify. All right, back to the show.
Kevin Bailey [00:08:56]:
Build that network. Yeah. A primary important part of wealth. I'll give a shout out to powderkeg real quick because we're both from Indy. Powder keg is a great, great tech community for getting to know, meet people, dreams. You wouldn't exist without powder keg. So I feel the same way as you do.
Clayton Thompson [00:09:09]:
Let's throw Mike Kelly out there, too.
Kevin Bailey [00:09:11]:
Oh, man. Yeah. Mike Kelly for sure.
Clayton Thompson [00:09:13]:
The SSD is an investor in us. Mike Cody, Mike Florian, Connor, all those guys love that team. They really helped a lot.
Kevin Bailey [00:09:19]:
Yeah. No big shout out to developer town. Mike Kelly, Michael Klauren. Great community there, too. All right, so speaking of people and networks, last question I asked during the breathwork session was, who has most impacted your founder journey? So love for you to give somebody a shout out and maybe share a little bit about how they helped you.
Clayton Thompson [00:09:35]:
I really thought about this question the most, more than anything, because you were sharing about, I think you had said you got your master's in neuroscience, I think.
Kevin Bailey [00:09:44]:
Yeah, applied neuroscience, finishing it.
Clayton Thompson [00:09:46]:
Yeah. So I didn't go to college, and there have been a lot of people along my journey that have given me opportunities. And so I sit back and I look and I think back when I'm 17, I think back when I'm 21. I think back as I advanced my career and my previous corporate, you know, when I was in the corporate world and how I went about this. But in my founder journey, who's making the most impact? Who's made the most impact on me? And surprisingly enough, through all these years of building business and being an entrepreneur, it's actually going to be this fractional COo that I've taken on in the past six months. I dropped his name earlier, DJ Mueller. He was introduced to me by Jeb Boehner. I think I know what Jeb introduced me to him, but he's came on and serving as a fractional COo right now, and.
Clayton Thompson [00:10:32]:
And he actually is going out there and he's got a company called one to 100 Advisors. He works with companies like ourselves who do sit in a room by themselves and are isolated and don't know how to get from one employee to 100. But DJ has just came in and really helped me become the best version of the CEO that I could be. I have a lot more to learn with him, and he's been extremely impactful. If I could tell a quick, real quick small story about that. We raised a decent amount of money on a pretty great valuation and it was extremely hard to do. You know, we said it's a million dollar valuation. I'm not ashamed to say that we raised over $2 million, but there was a time where that was extremely hard.
Clayton Thompson [00:11:11]:
And so at this year, I set out to raise about half a million dollars. And when I was doing that, we actually got to the point where there was an oversubscription and elevate, who was already an investor in us, kind of showed interest that they'd like to do it. And so we, we got through this with them and we ran back through due diligence and they came back and they said, sorry, we don't know that we're going to do that at this time. And I was pretty upset. I don't want to say I upset, I was upset, but I had a. I felt like they put me through a lot of work for nothing. And, and DJ came in and sat down with their team and we talked about every, all the reasons as to why. And he really helped them understand what was going on.
Clayton Thompson [00:11:49]:
And they sent over to cash. They invested $200,000 in us and I understood exactly as to why they did. DJ brought the calm and the confidence of everything. It's not that they weren't happy with what we were doing, it's that I needed to get better in other areas. And they made that note. And DJ, we put together what we're calling project scale right now and working towards this for elevating for our investors and for our customers. And he's just hugely impactful for that. I'm going to just say DJ Molars been the most impactful for me as a CEO, founder over my journey, but there's a lot of other people that I could credit at any moment.
Kevin Bailey [00:12:25]:
Wow. So he proved his value there, came in, helped get over the line.
Clayton Thompson [00:12:29]:
What's funny is we didn't need the money, but in hindsight, because it was an oversubscribe, in hindsight, I'm sure glad we took it because it extended our Runway to where next year we'll do a series a and we'll be able to set a better valuation because we have this additional money. So we're aiming for a double valuation sometime next year. Well, try to get it. I mean, we're seeing really great growth. We're hitting record sales months every month and growing fast. You know, you'd share that we're accelerating in our growth, where I'll announce soon that some of the benchmarks and achievements that we're hitting, but it feels like it's going to come to fruition. It feels like there are a lot of tech founders that are struggling in things and we're fortunate at this moment to not be going through those things. And some of that is clearly because we have the right team around us.
Kevin Bailey [00:13:14]:
Beautiful, man. Yeah, yeah. It's certainly been a tough few quarters, if not few years, for a lot of founders. It's wonderful that Membershine is growing right now like that and successfully completing raises. Capital markets are a little tight right now. And you guys obviously membership software for clubs, organizations, groups be said, you guys serve a lot of homeowners associations, right?
Clayton Thompson [00:13:35]:
Yeah, primarily homeowners associations. We're signing probably eight to ten clients a week right now. So, you know, I had to, when I got with Spark is I got three screens, I had to make sure I turned off everything else in my phone down because if you heard the phone ringing, it's actually prospects coming in. So we're in a good position. Homeowner associations are starting to be required to use our software, to use software like ours, and we're found at the top of all Google searches and we're the highest rated software. So right now we're in that space and we'll go into other adjacent markets in the next year. So, so yeah, we're fortunate in that regard.
Kevin Bailey [00:14:09]:
Let's go, man. Well, I really appreciate sharing, Clayton. We're about, about ready to wrap up. Is there anything else you want to share or maybe share a little bit of how people can find you, get in touch with you?
Clayton Thompson [00:14:18]:
Membershine is a company. It's not necessarily a product, and people can find us membershine.com. but unless you're in a homeowners association and serving on your board and see a need for software for to run your homeowners association, you really wouldn't need to find us. But we have a product line called Hoa Start, which is hoastart.com dot. A lot of people helping us with this product right now, throw Ted Hickels name out there. He's starting to get us into webinars and everything else on the marketing side, serving kind of as a fractional cmo. So yeah, I mean, people are in that space more than welcome to find us there, reach out. But we'll make announcements in the coming months when we start to, to move.
Clayton Thompson [00:14:59]:
There's a lot of people that can use our product. We're just focused on the HoA market. Let me just use it as an example. Think of any club, group membership organization. Actually, let me say it like this. I'm in a lot of clubs right now. I'm in, for example, Founders Network. And what I've noticed about founders network is that they will send, they'll use this software to send me this and they'll use this software for me to register for event and they'll use this software for their website.
Clayton Thompson [00:15:23]:
And I'm using three or four or five different softwares for that membership. Our software is an all in one tool that handles all of those things, if that makes sense. So imagine being able to store your documents or take surveys or have a website or send text messages or event registration, even reserve your tennis courts or make your online due payments. That's what our software does. It fits very well for the homeowners associations, but any nonprofit could use it. We just need to get in that space to where we can start to be prepared to sell to them.
Kevin Bailey [00:15:52]:
Awesome. And I see you got a pretty active account on LinkedIn, so I guess if you want to personally connect with you, that's probably a good place to go.
Clayton Thompson [00:15:58]:
Absolutely.
Kevin Bailey [00:15:59]:
All right. Clayton Thompson on LinkedIn. Well, Clayton, thank you very much for being on the show, man. I really appreciate your time and insights. And if you are a founder or CEO is curious about the breath work that we did, the beginning of this, we do run a breathwork session for CEO's and founders. It's Thursdays at noon Eastern Standard Time, so you can shoot me an email@kevindreamfuel.com if you want an invite to that, but otherwise, we'll see you on the next Dreamfuel Show. Thanks for being a guest, Clayton.
Clayton Thompson [00:16:22]:
Thanks for having me. Appreciate it.
Kevin Bailey [00:16:26]:
Hey, everyone, hope you enjoyed the dream fuel show. If you'd like to continue listening to more episodes, subscribe to Apple, Spotify, YouTube or wherever you get your podcasts. We'll be here every other week. And if you want to learn more about Dreamfuel's octane program for tech leaders, go to dreamfuel.com/octane or just click the link in the description.