Subscribe
Share
Share
Embed
Behind the scenes stories of how we're building bootstrapped companies
I was talking with my friend, Jesse Poojie, and he said, Andrew, I started this company, growth assistant, outsourced, uh, marketing assistants. It went from zero to 15 million in sales. It's continuing to grow. I want to teach people what I learned as I built this business. I said, interesting. And then he says, Andrew, I've got this other company unbloat.
It's a direct to consumer product. And it's actually had yes, millions in sales, but also a lot of challenges. I want to tell people about the problems I've had so that they could learn to avoid them and build their businesses better and, and learn from that. I said, interesting. Then the two of us realized, you know, we need to do is have a podcast.
And what we'll do in the podcast is talk about stories of how Jesse's companies are doing. And Jesse's got a venture studio called Gateway X, which launches companies like that. But beyond that, we also want to talk to the entrepreneurs that we know whose companies are doing well and whose companies are struggling and be open about what we're learning.
I think you're going to get some inside information from Jesse and these companies in this podcast. In upcoming podcast episodes. And you're gonna get some inside information from our friends. And I should say this first episode is kind of a setup episode. Where the two of us are just kind of having fun with a live audience.
Talking through why we're doing this. Where we're going with it. And um, it's sponsored of course. Because if we're bootstrappers of course we need sponsors. And the first sponsor that we reached out to is a tool that we have both loved and used for a long time. Helps us clear our inbox. I'll tell you more about it later.
But for now if you want a faster inbox and try it for free. Go to superhuman. com slash jesse. All right, let's get into our hangout.
[00:01:22] Andrew Warner: Jesse.
start with, uh, introducing yourself.
[00:01:26] Jesse Pujji: For those who don't know me, I'm Jesse Poojie. Uh, I guess I, I don't call, well, I guess I'm a serial entrepreneur at this point. But my quick story, born and raised in St. Louis, mom's a teacher, dad's an entrepreneur, uh, started my career in management consulting and in finance and told myself if I love those jobs, I'll do them forever.
But I was the entrepreneurial kid. I had the snow, you know, the snow shoveling business and the DJing business and a t shirt business in college. And so I started my first company in 2010 called Ampush. Uh, there's a hilarious interview of Andrew actually interviewing me 12 years ago or 13 years ago when we had just figured out how to make Facebook ads work.
Uh, we were one of the first companies in the world to make them work. And we became one of the largest spenders on Facebook. And our clients were companies like Uber grew them to 600 cities globally. Uh, clash of clans. We launched clash Royale, the largest mobile game in history and dollar shave club, we grew them to 3 million subs among many other companies like Peloton, blue apron, et cetera, grew that business for about 10 years as a CEO and co founder became left the CEO role.
And then we sold the business to a private equity rollup.
It was an awesome outcome.
Very exciting for everyone. And you know, the, the short version of the story is towards the end, I started burning out and wasn't having fun anymore, uh, and started working with a coach who really changed my life, but really got me focused on what matters to me and what matters to me as, as Andrew knows is I love coaching and teaching people and getting, creating that space for people to be the best versions of themselves.
And I love entrepreneurship and I use it as a tool to help those people grow and develop. And so I wanted to spend all my time doing those two things. And I was like, well, what would let me do that? And the answer was, start a venture studio. And so we started GatewayX about three years ago. We've probably launched, I'd say, like five and a half companies.
We probably have four running right now. So not all of them have been a success. They, you know, what, what sort of brings them all together is, one, they're all bootstrap giants. Which means, what I define as, they get profitable quickly, they grow ambitiously off their own profits, and they grow at a high linear growth rate for a long time.
So very different from a venture funded business, which we can talk about. They all have to do with my unfair advantages, which tend to be focused on digital marketing, you know, or, or the public brand or something like that. And then there's all a unique set of values and culture that all of them share.
So they're kind of like cousins and we spent a lot of time doing conscious leadership, which we can talk about. Uh, we spent a lot of time on entrepreneur rigor, which is this mixture of speed and also being analytical. Uh, but that's me. That's the intro. I have three kids. Uh, Ricky nine, Serena seven and Mila, uh, five months, six months.
[00:03:58] Andrew Warner: You know what? One of the things that I'm, I'm going to keep making notes here about what we can do to improve. And one of the things that I'm noticing that I want to do next time is come up with a better title. I notice that the, the things that are live on Twitter that I pay attention to have some kind of click baity title.
Something like, We should have gone with how the hell did we make this much like given a number and then say how do we get? This big or something like that instead. I went.
[00:04:19] Jesse Pujji: a month in one month or something like that.
[00:04:21] Andrew Warner: Yeah, yeah, I did say that we talked about the revenue because I think it's pretty interesting the way that you would Generated the revenue so fast for bootstrap Giants What's interesting to me is that you actually like the early days the early days of like we don't know what it is For me in many ways Jesse.
It's fucking hellacious because I start to go into my own self doubt Immediately on anything that I do so it goes to Holy crap, nobody's paying attention to this. It's not working. And I go through my mental list of everything that didn't work. So for me, the idea of doing what you're doing, which is I'm going to partner up, I'm going to create companies.
And then once the companies are off the ground, I'm going to take off. To me, that's hellacious. That's a full of self doubt landmine.
[00:05:07] Jesse Pujji: Yeah. I don't, well,
[00:05:08] Andrew Warner: not feel that?
[00:05:09] Jesse Pujji: that's, that's a good question. I think there is a part we, and I've talked to written a lot about this, you know, the, the standard thing of like, I'm sitting at my job and I come up with a business idea and then I start it. Is a hard way to start a business. And you know, I, I also dislike product market fit.
You know, the one business,
[00:05:27] Andrew Warner: Meaning the hunt for product market
[00:05:28] Jesse Pujji: Yeah, it was Kahani. And it was like, Oh, I don't know if it's going to work. And then it doesn't work. And you kind of go through this and it sucks. And it's a very, nobody talks about how emotionally taxing finding product market fit is, and then it's like, Oh, and then I found it.
And then I had to go build a business. Well, building a business is hard enough. And so I, I, my version of it, as you know, as we've done, and we could talk about it in the context of bootstrap giants is let's go sell some shit. Let's go sell something to someone and then we'll figure it out. And it's okay if we don't, if it's not perfect, when we sell it, we may lose a customer, we may lose a couple of things, but that's going to get us in motion.
And that's all the businesses I've ever started that were successful. All started that way. And I'm not saying it's the only way, but it's, it's my way that I've done it. That I get to do the, what I think of as the fun part. And that's what we did here. We, we put together a media kit on notion. We can share it with everyone.
And we said, Hey, we're going to, we, and we told everyone, and I think there's a lot of power in saying, I don't know guys, but Hey, Hey, here's my following, here's how many impressions I get. Here's how many people read my newsletter. I think I can get you customers. I don't know. I really don't, I need at least three months.
So you got to pay me for three months. And I put together these packages and you can edit them if you want customer. And I think we had a over 50 percent conversion rate on those conversations. Um, and now we're trying to figure it out, you know, it shot out, by the way, shout out to superhuman notion, rippling.
Those are our sponsors. Like, but we told all of them the deal and that we were going to figure it out as we went. Um, and I think that actually earns trust and earns credibility. And I think too much, too many times the young founders try to sell more than they can do instead of just being honest about where they are.
You
[00:07:01] Andrew Warner: was tweeting over COVID and we could talk about why, but he was building an audience because he's good at this type of mechanic of sharing things that matter, building up an audience and so on. And then he started a newsletter called bootstrap giants about the philosophy of building a business that is both bootstrapped and big.
There's like this. Sense that you could either go bootstrap and have a nice little four hour work week business or go big and that means taking venture funding and you either crash or you or you go exceptional and if you go exceptional, maybe you do well, or maybe you end up like Draft Kings where the company sells for hundreds of millions and you end up with nothing.
And so the middle ground is one of you bootstrap and go big and if if you fail, you still own your business. And so that's what the newsletter was about. And then a few months ago, Jesse said, You know what? I'm going to start to sell ads in it and see what happens. I, I know that for example, you'd listed in the, and I helped to put the media kit together a little bit and I saw that you listed a podcast in it is coming soon, but you're basically selling a thing that didn't exist.
And truthfully, it's been three months, not a single sponsor has gotten a podcast episode and it's still listed as a thing that they're paying for. How do you like, how do you tackle the fact that you're, you're experimenting with people who are looking for results and paying it? We'll talk about the money and how much I paid in a second, but what about that?
[00:08:19] Jesse Pujji: know, I, I think just being honest is. Worth a lot. And I think people bet on people ultimately. And I, you know, I think it's easy if you're listening to this to go, Oh, of course, Jesse, you've started a successful company. You've got all these followers, blah, blah, blah. But even when I was 25 or 26 and was starting ambush, we would walk into meetings and go like, Hey, we're, we used to work at these big companies.
We don't, we think we can be really good at digital marketing to generate leads. What do you think? And I always, I tell this story, this, this guy was our first client was literally like a Pakistani dude at Kaplan university is like, Hey, you're Brown. I'm Brown. Like here's a test budget. I'll try it. And he wasn't, there was no company he was betting on.
There was no, he was betting on us. He had met us and he thought he could bet on us. And I think a lot of founders do make this mistake of being, of bullshitting too much and being too blustery. Instead of saying, look, I'm a smart person. I'm going to work really hard. Here's what I don't know. Here's what I think I do know.
Give me a shot. And I think that's just worth a lot. I think you get a lot of credibility. And that's kind of what we told our sponsors here. But just to be clear, that's what I told a lot of the first customers at Ampush. Um, I was probably a little higher on the BS ometer, but not much more. You know, people are betting on you ultimately.
And then you can deliver or you can't. And if you can't, it's not that much skin off of any big
[00:09:35] Andrew Warner: Would you have given back the money?
[00:09:38] Jesse Pujji: To who?
[00:09:39] Andrew Warner: Let's say the, let's say Superhuman didn't get the podcast and they didn't get the results that they were looking for in, in the newsletter. Would you have said thank you for taking a bet on me? I'm sorry. It didn't work out. Let me give you some money back. So what would you have done?
[00:09:54] Jesse Pujji: They would have churned and I would have said, sorry, I wish it would have gone differently. Can we try back in six months from now we have our shit together. I've got a lot of customers. I've got a lot of customers in my life that the first time around it didn't work. And you know, they, they, there's another thing I say all the time, Andrew, like the teams that were working with all these organizations are awesome.
And they also, everybody likes to be part of a thing that's going to work in a startup.
[00:10:17] Andrew Warner: Yeah
[00:10:18] Jesse Pujji: I've got 10 people out in the world right now who said I was Ampush's first customer. I was Jesse's first customer. 10 individuals because they want to have that cachet of being a part of a successful thing from early.
And so, you know, no, I think these companies test people all the time. I think, yeah, I wouldn't have given the money back. I would have said sorry. I would have expressed disappointment that it didn't work and been honest about that. But no, I wouldn't have given the money back. Yeah.
[00:10:46] Andrew Warner: why I thought Notion had paid money for these ads. And I, it's a great product. I live in Notion. It's always on my, my screen. I thought it wouldn't work because everybody had Notion already. And for a while it wasn't working. And then also, frankly, our rep over there.
We get on calls with her and she doesn't, she doesn't show any enthusiasm. And I actually called, call this out in the last call. I said, do you, I won't say her name. I don't know. I think she's pretty private said, I'm sensing that you don't like any of this cause I'm looking at your face and she goes, no, it's not my face.
I'm Russian. I'm not, I'm not sharing expressions and enthusiasm the way you are. All right. So this is actually the, one of the best lessons that I, that I learned from working with you. You bear hug people. So you end up with notion as a client. They don't just get ads, they are suddenly in our slack. You, Knack the COO, other people are going in and chatting with them in the Slack obsessively.
We just posted this. We just took this little poop and we looked at Notion at the time. Any little thing that happens, they know about. I would feel so hesitant to do as much messaging as you do. And then it's also, it's not working. What do you think we should do? Which again is something that I never would have done because these people pay me freaking money.
It's on me now to figure out what to do. And you're like, what do you think we should do? And then we end up with this collaborative experience in Slack which then carries over to. phone calls, which through that we discovered our rep there said this one thing really blew up and I go Oh, that blew up.
Let's do it again. And so we did it two days ago. And now I'm going to go back into Slack and say, did this work this time? And then there's another idea that worked for one of our other partners. I'll say, did this, we're going to do this, that, uh, did that work? And that kind of feedback is something that's uniquely Jesse and uniquely not Andrew.
I'm very, if you guys have seen me, Pavel, you've seen me for a long time. I'll respond to messages, Nadira, I respond to messages, but Nadira, I love the guy. He's come over to my house. He's a fantastic fricking cook. Uh, had a great dinner with a bunch of friends that we both know. I never send a message and go, Hey dude, how are you doing?
Even though I think about him. So, you do that. I like that. Talk more about
[00:12:48] Jesse Pujji: think, I think people really forget about the human parts of this, you know, when, uh,
[00:12:54] Andrew Warner: it. We hate it. Like, we're starting a business to
[00:12:56] Jesse Pujji: but like, but like when someone buys a 10, when someone sells their company for 10 billion, let's just talk about a crazy huge deal. Somebody personally is going to make 3 billion off of that transaction.
A human is going to make that people read about that and they go, Oh, the machine of one company, Microsoft bought this company for Ten billion dollars. But that's not true. Microsoft didn't buy the company for ten billion dollars. Some human named Bob, the VP, knew some founder named, you know, Andrew, the founder, and they developed a relationship.
And ultimately, even billions of dollars in decisions are made by a bunch of humans around a table. And so I think, I think the human experience is just, it's, it is business. It's a big part of business. You know, the story, by the way, we should tweet this, the story. You know, we had come from consulting and banking, the founders of Ampush.
And so we, we were great at analyzing shit and sharing information and sharing data and generally doing that. And when we first started Ampush, we sucked at performance marketing. In fact, a client one time, I can remember this like as he goes, you know, the leads you guys send me are pretty mediocre, but every time I sit with you guys, I learn something.
So I'm going to keep you on the buy. That's literally in performance marketing for those who know, and the same thing we're doing with our sponsors right now is. They want a certain amount of results for, for the dollars they're sending us. But what we learned was, and we didn't mean to do that. We kind of did it on accident, but one of my business adages is do you have success on accident and then learn how to repeat the accident, right?
So this guy had said this to us and we go, Oh, interesting. That could be part of our value ad. And so since then, anytime I'm in a client relationship. I do everything I can to give them information, to collaborate with them, to be the absolute best human partner that they could possibly have because it creates some insulation around the relationship in case, and there will invariably be bad things that happen in the relationship.
There's going to be, we're going to miss post something on notion or we're going to share some information incorrectly. We're going to have a bad month or whatever it is with these sponsors, but they're going to go, wait, hold on. I've got trust with these guys. I've known what they, you know, they've been posting about with me every single week.
And so. We didn't do it on purpose initially. It wasn't like a master plan, but then we started realizing that it made a difference. And that's become a, just a way we do business. Now we, I do business me and I say we, I oftentimes mean me and Nick, my, my ambush co founder.
[00:15:11] Andrew Warner: Okay. Um, one of the other things that I noticed is knack, your CEO, a gateway X, who's working with me at bootstrap giants. He posts every single thing that we do for a sponsor or about a sponsor or any relationship to sponsor into slack. I talked to him about it and he said, look, this goes back to my previous experience where if you can't deliver for your customers results they want, if you just show them how much work you're doing, they'll appreciate that you're not, you know, Careless and that you're putting in the effort and it goes a long way even if you can't get them the results that you
[00:15:41] Jesse Pujji: Totally. Same concept, right? And if you're any of these sponsors right now, we know this too, which, and just for everyone thinking about it, like they, they're not sure if this is going to work for them. Like it's as much an indictment of them as it is on us. Right. Unless they have examples where it's working really well, that, that like, they also want to make sure that this works.
And so I think it's a partnership, right? We're both trying to make it work. And I think that's an important thing to keep front and center.
I'm going to take a moment right now to tell you about our sponsor. And of course, this podcast is sponsored. If we're going to bootstrap, we need sponsors to help get us going. And our first sponsor is a tool that Jesse and I have both used for years, literally before we ever took a sponsorship from them.
It's superhuman. It's the best way to clear out your inbox. And I'll give you just a few reasons why we love it. Number one, it's AI is actually really good. It has been trained on my emails, on my inbox so well that. When I just click one button and it responds to an email, even my wife can't tell that I didn't write it.
Number two, if you want to summarize long messages, it gives you automatic summaries at the top. And if you want it to be a little bit more in depth, you hit the I key on your keyboard and you get a more in depth summary. Number three, it's got gamification, meaning it gives you points and it makes it feel, I'm a little laughing as I'm saying But it makes it fun to actually clear out your inbox.
And then next it's got swipes, gestures, and keyboard shortcuts that are designed to make you go through email as fast as possible. These are just a few reasons. And boy, there's so many others for why we love superhuman. We're going to let you try it for free right now, using our partner URL link. All you have to do is go to superhuman.
com slash Jesse. And of course there's going to be a link in the show notes, superhuman. com slash Jesse, let's get back into the program.
[00:17:26] Andrew Warner: Okay, I want to take some of the questions that people had had in the audience Nadir is asking about the business model for I guess for For bootstrap Giants, and so I said it started out with a newsletter What, where do you see this going? I have a couple of ideas for where it's going to, and we should also talk about the partnership between gateway X, how that fits in with what a bootstrap giants is doing.
Um, and if you're out there listening, if there's anything else that you want us to talk about, or if there's anything that you've noticed that works well for you with sponsors or for you with publishers, if you are a sponsor, let me know in the chat, I want to hear more of what's working for other people and start incorporating it.
I'm very much in the, like the, the self improvement. Period. And I want to
[00:18:12] Jesse Pujji: Well, let's talk about bootstrap giants as a business. I think. You know, creating content online and publicly is something I started doing maybe three years ago. And, and the reasons, you know, the, the, I had moved, moved out of the Bay area after 10 years, COVID was happening and I was like, shit, like I want to still be in, you know, in the room where it happens, like I want to be having conversations.
So I started tweeting. I think the other reason for it was, was a lot of people gave me the feedback that I'm good at synthesizing learnings and sharing them. And then that people would value that. And there'd be a benefit from that. And so I started tweeting just kind of fun. I had started no companies in gateway X at that point.
And it started growing and I started having a lot of fun and excitement with it. And, and then the most important part was like, like I got tons of messages and people were like, man, thanks for posting this. I needed to read this. Or how did you, you know, And I started feeling like, wow, this is a really scaled way.
I can help a lot of people. And then as I started starting the businesses, I realized, man, I can't make time for, I'm not making time for the content stuff and people go, Hey, where have you been, Jesse? I haven't posted in a minute. And so that's when I realized that this needed to be a business for me.
Like I, I couldn't, I couldn't stomach spending money and losing money on it without making some money. And then it's just like pretty simple for me. It's, it's, it's core to who I am from a business perspective. And that's why we started bootstrap giants. And I think the goal is, well, hold on, let's at least have enough money to pay for all of this stuff.
So that we can bring someone on like Andrew, we can have teams of people and we can actually go and the mission is I want there to be as much content out there for people bootstrapping, profitable, ambitious companies as there is for venture funded companies. I think there's millions of VC websites.
There's content stuff. There's first round. I mean, there's great content out there. A lot of it is cross applicable, but it's all in this venture framing. And I want to create more content for the people going, I just want to grow my business profitably and scale it. And. How should I, how should I manage my balance sheet?
How do I borrow money in that case? How do I sell them managed to private equity? If that's what I want to do. There's so many topics that I think are very under discussed and I want that to be the sort of the mission of this. Now the business side of it, honestly, Andrew and I have no idea. Like sponsors was an idea where like, okay, that seems like a fast way to revenue.
Let's get, let's get going there. That'll at least get us the OPEX to keep starting to run the business and spend some money and get some resources. But what else? I mean, we've,
[00:20:23] Andrew Warner: Let's pause then on advertising because you created a media kit, put it out there. We talked about some of the sponsors. Monthly revenue right out of the gate was how much?
[00:20:32] Jesse Pujji: Around 40K. We had three packages, 5K, 10K, and 15K a month, minimum three months. We negotiated them a little bit with people, but we got to about 40K, uh, per month. I think we'll be a little higher this month, right? Or
[00:20:46] Andrew Warner: We ended up signing up, uh, we,
[00:20:49] Jesse Pujji: We got a couple that are
[00:20:50] Andrew Warner: We ended
[00:20:51] Jesse Pujji: super ones we're gonna announce, but let's call it 50K.
[00:20:53] Andrew Warner: you'd been friends with the founder. Yeah. Yeah. And you reached out to him and he made an introduction and they said, come, we're about to launch AI. We want you guys to help us with the AI launch. And so that was a really
[00:21:04] Jesse Pujji: was actually all NAC, by the
[00:21:05] Andrew Warner: info didn't want any conversions.
They just, that was NACU suggested that the
[00:21:11] Jesse Pujji: Now that was all knack that knack just got that deal done. Um, I think we have a little delay, Andrew.
[00:21:20] Andrew Warner: We do. If for some Twitter is now doing way better than it's ever done before, but if you ever see any issues with it, just assume that I'm delayed and you can, you can talk without talking over each other. Okay. So zoom info, we did grow. The next thing that we want to do is not just sell sponsorship. We want to create a product for the audience, and we're going to start experimenting with that in public.
We're working with someone that you've worked with on one of your previous businesses. A guy named Nathan May, he is going to help us, uh, talk with the audience, understand what their needs are, create a couple of MVPs, and then start selling a product directly to the audience. I'm going to be talking to more people who are in the audience and understanding what they'd like, uh, going forward too, so that we can experiment with maybe bigger products, a couple of smaller products and see which one
[00:22:06] Jesse Pujji: let's talk about the strategy specifically in the spirit of building in public. So the idea for everyone who's listening is obviously we want to grow on Twitter and LinkedIn and some of these social presence. They're kind of the top of the funnel and a lot of good stuff comes from them. But ultimately the goal is to get a bunch of people on an email list.
And that is an owned audience as they say, right? Meaning. Those are people no one can take away from you. Whereas Twitter and LinkedIn can change something tomorrow and, and they're gone. And so you can do, you know, email acquisition. Today we do it, you know, on Twitter and it's organic and we pay nothing for the emails we acquire.
And I think the list is getting close to 20k. But Nathan said, hey, you should be buying ads to drive, to drive this. And I'm like, okay, that's fine. He's like, I don't know how much it's going to cost. He's like 1 to 2 in email acquired. And a bunch of people like Nick Huber and Sean have done this. And again, I'm, I'm like, I don't like waste spending money.
I like, I just don't like burning cash. So I have the cash if I want it, but I'm like, I don't want to do that. So let's think of another way to do it. And that's kind of where we came up with this. You know, he came up with the idea. It's not, it's not a novel idea, but Hey, what if Jesse puts together a guide for how he gets introductions for B2B businesses and drives meetings, you know, for new sales?
And he, not, not just like the way he does it, but the example, email templates and recording of him doing it. How did he get growth assistant? How do you get so many meetings for them and charge 29 for it? And then maybe another one we talked a lot about that. I, so I liked that one, which is a 29 for the end all sales kit of Jesse, how he does B2B sales, and I've done that for 15 years, the other one is like, I just sold my business private equity.
Like, how do you sell your business private equity? Maybe that one's 199 or 99, including a list of good PE firms. And. These all should be things really valuable for a bootstrap giants founder. And then the strategy is hopefully we can acquire emails and there's enough of a conversion rate on the revenue side that at least it's break even if not slightly profitable, but then it lets us light up email acquisition.
And so now we go from maybe today we get two, 3, 000 emails a month to 10, 000 emails a month, but do it in a cost neutral way. Uh, I'm sharing all that just so everybody knows, like that's, that's kind of what we're thinking about doing. And we, that's how we build up the community is. It's some sort of loop that, that is in some say is costless to grow the business.
[00:24:18] Andrew Warner: I think that if we can make that work, that would basically be the Holy Grail of, of content, right? You, you find a way, as Nathan calls it, to self liquidate. I don't even know why he calls it self liquidating, but essentially he's saying, you, you earn more when people sign up to your email list than when, uh, than you pay to get them there.
Long term, we don't fully know, but, One of Jesse's other businesses is a company called Aux Insights, which advises, excuse me, private equity on the companies that they acquire on their media. So Jesse, when I came to St. Louis to see him in person, he was on a call with a private equity firm that was talking about the finances of an acquisition target, which was really interesting to hear it.
We're talking about hundreds of millions of dollars being discussed and the Aux Insights team is like guiding them and helping them understand it all. And I thought. There's something in here that we as entrepreneurs don't know about. There's a whole world of private equity that I don't know how to do it.
And I remember when I was starting Mixergy, my, my interview podcast, The venture firms in Los Angeles where I started were so open and eager to have entrepreneurs know them that they would partner with me and they would have me bring entrepreneurs to their offices for drinks, for lunch and all that so that entrepreneurs know, Hey, these are the people with money.
They want to invest in you. They want you to get to know them so that you can build companies that they could work with. There isn't any of that in private equity. And meanwhile, private equity. Is in many ways a better fit for entrepreneurs And so I don't know how to make that connection for venture capital in some ways It was it was lunches in other ways.
It was angelus, but I think there's something in that and you having that access Means that we have more access to it, but I don't know. What do you think
[00:26:07] Jesse Pujji: Well, you had the insight. I mean, you had the insight, I think that I hadn't seen. It's like anything. You don't know your own strengths or you don't know things you don't know. And you're like, dude, what's up with all this private equity stuff. And partly because of where I went to college, partly because of who we sold ambush to, you know, that's a world, you know, I S I know extremely well.
And you know, There's lower middle market, middle market. There's the bulge, you know, there's all these different types of firms. They buy different kinds of companies and they don't always buy the whole company, you know, and, and I think again, to your point, I think venture is, is like a very well worn, uh, path in the forest and private equity is just so poorly understood.
And I think it's the nature of like the types of personalities, the types of deals everyone does. And so I think that's another big part of what's on our list to help everyone navigate. My opinion is that if you're a bootstrap giant, if you were someone listening is one of my friends and they go, I have a one to 10 million EBITDA business, and I think I want some ex outside help, or I think I want to take some money off the table, or I want to do something.
There's no way I would tell them to raise venture money, right? I just wouldn't do that. My brother's a venture capitalist. I'm not against VCs. I'm an LP in certain VCs, but it's just not the right fit for that. But instead, I'd say, hey, there's these awesome guys in private equity. They'll buy 70 percent of the business at a fair price from you.
They'll actually help you grow it from there and then maybe have a second exit where you can, you know, they buy 70%, you retain 30, you go to the next step. But nobody understands that as far, I mean, people can tell us in the audience who are listening, if that is valuable, but my sense is that it's a very poorly understood part of the world that actually for a bootstrap giants founder is, is the best source of capital, uh, when navigated correctly.
[00:27:44] Andrew Warner: And so when I think about venture capital they invest money for You the business and they wanted to grow a certain amount and they want a certain amount of, of influence depending on where they come into the, uh, into the company story. What's the private equity story? Like, where are they? How, what are they looking for?
Why are they better?
[00:28:07] Jesse Pujji: Yeah, I think it's just the one word that comes to mind. Andrew is alignment. Uh, so look, I think there's a lot of founders out there who are trying to build huge companies and exponentially grow and they really want to go down that path. And in that case, venture is a great fit, especially if your business needs a lot of capital to get to a certain level.
But let's talk about the business models of a VC versus a PE firm. A VC raises a hundred million dollar fund. And they expect, like, say, let's say they write 10, 10 million checks, just making those numbers up. They expect 7 or 8 of those to go to 0, or like 6 or 7 of them to go to 3 of them to go to maybe return the money, 1 of them to maybe 5x, and then 1 of them to like 20 or 30x.
And if you just do the back of the envelope math on that, that would get them back a return on their fund. They raise 100 million, they need to return 300 million to their investors over 10 years. That's it. That's how all investment vehicles work. So, but the way the distribution is, is that they're looking for one or two lotto ticket winners.
The rest, they honestly don't care that much about. And, so they have to push, if you were in their position, they're not bad people, but if you were in their position, you'd push everyone to grow as hard as you can because you don't care if it's a zero, but you care a lot if it's a, if it's a 20 or 100x, let's call it.
That's not at all how private equity works. Private equity does not expect any of the business, if there's a 100 million private equity fund, they're going to write five 20 million checks. So they're writing bigger checks. They're usually taking a large minority or even a majority share of the company. And they don't want any of them to be zeros. And they're actually targeting a 3x. So they basically take that same 300 million goal and say, well, each of you need, I need a path to you getting to 3x in the next 5 to 10 years. So for company A, you're making EBITDA, how do we get you to 6 million in EBITDA?
Company B, you're doing 7 in EBITDA, how do we get you to 20 in EBITDA? So, so a lot of times a bootstrap, most bootstrap giant founders I know have built profitable growing companies and they want to keep growing them profitably. And they want to run the organization and enjoy it and make money and that's like what they want.
They don't want huge exponential returns, game changers. Again, there are people who want that and that, God bless, right? There's nothing wrong with that. But that's why the private equity guys, they're just more aligned to the same thing as the founder. Now of course there's things to manage on who has control.
Is it majority minority? There's a million details that need to get absorbed, but in general that asset class, that business model feels like a better fit for a lot of the bootstrap giants founders. I know.
[00:30:32] Andrew Warner: What do you all think if you're listening, um, What do you think of this? Uh, understanding of private equity is, do you think that this is an area that we should be spending more time on? Is there something that something else that you think is more interesting? But once you give me like a yes or no, do you think we should be spending more time on private equity as a business?
Not here today, necessarily. And a few of you have been asking about Mixergy. Is it still on? Yes, it is still on. I'm still doing interviews on there. I've just felt a little bit, just worn out by some of what I've seen in the, in the venture funded entrepreneurial world. I'm seeing a lot of businesses that raise hundreds of millions of dollars and basically take over the market and then they come over and they boast to me about how they have 10 million in sales or something like that and just doesn't feel as exciting.
It doesn't feel like that same, that same energy that I felt back when the guys at Airbnb were pitching me on being on, uh, on, on the podcast and they had done so many clever things like Come out with a cereal, like doing inflatable air mattresses at their house. When, uh, Paul Graham was telling me about the creative nonsense that some of his people are doing, trying to figure out something out, right?
I I met Justin Kahn, uh, years later. He invited me to his house, and we did a course together for Mixergy at his house. But I met him when he was just trying to figure the thing out. And I was using Twitch when it was just trying to figure out what Twitch was. And I miss that kind of
[00:31:50] Jesse Pujji: some of what's happened, I think in venture ecosystem, Is there was these huge, all these companies you're giving examples of were humongous outcomes for the founders or the VCs or everybody. And I don't know what the numbers are, but I think the amount of venture capital invested in the last 10 years has probably gone up by a factor of five.
And this may be something that's not too popular to say, but I don't think there's enough entrepreneurial talent to actually support that amount of investment. I think the constrained resource is there's just not enough killer entrepreneurs and killer ideas that are going to all create. 10 billion outcomes.
There's plenty of founders, by the way, who can create a hundred or 500 million outcomes or smaller than that. Even 50, 50 million outcome is a completely life changing outcome for any human who starts it. And so that's kind of what I think is going on. And these venture guys are pumping money into the, into these businesses that really just aren't going to ever become anything like that.
And so you just get a lot of average stuff happening.
[00:32:47] Andrew Warner: I'm seeing a lot of, uh, yeses from people about it, but actually it's pretty interesting. So face Twitter live has been really interesting. The numbers are growing. It turns out because we figured out a way, Jesse, to post this on both your account and mine, the audience is kind of split. But the numbers of viewers are going up and up and up as we continue which is which is interesting And that shows me that what happens is people see it on twitter and then they're more likely to jump in We've hopefully and I think we have been doing a good job here So we haven't had a lot of churn and people have been sticking with us So that's been helpful the the conversation back has been a lot quieter than I would have expected And i'm seeing some people who i've known for a bit jeffrey barrows.
Hey, buddy. It's good to see you out here I'm seeing pavel. He's always really good about like interacting with me Um,
[00:33:33] Jesse Pujji: have work to do, Andrew. They're just working, they're working away while we're talking. I
[00:33:37] Andrew Warner: Maybe that's what it is. That is the way that I use it too. I, I listen in the background and maybe that's what's happening. And if you're doing
[00:33:43] Jesse Pujji: They want to pick up a couple of good nuggets and that's, and then, and continue to get whatever shit done as they're getting done.
[00:33:48] Andrew Warner: Okay, and one, one other little thing that I got that was helpful was, uh, from Anonymizer. He says, listen, next time if you want a real good clickbaity title, call it, Is Talking About You. That way when people see it on Twitter in the upper right, it says, Andrew Warner, and then underneath it, it says, Is Talking About You, and how could you not click on that?
That's a good one. I'm telling
[00:34:07] Jesse Pujji: creativity of the internet is undefeated.
[00:34:09] Andrew Warner: So good. So good. Okay. So if they do want to get some nuggets, here's the part that was, was mind blowing. That was really interesting for me. I'm going to go with mind blowing. The process of how you work with Gateway X with companies is, is fascinating.
There is a partnership between the two, like between Gateway X and the company that's launched. But. I saw the public part, which is you help bring in, uh, talent, you help bring in an audience, you help bring in early revenue. You and the team, you actually is the part that I saw, the part that I didn't fully appreciate was what happens like day one you start working together and suddenly nack your, uh, COO is my COO and he's like the highest level COO that I could imagine.
He's coming in. He's building things. He's interacting with sponsors. I drop the ball, he picks it up, and he gets it done. He doesn't say, Andrew, you're not an organized person. He compensates for it by creating a system for it. And there's like this overwhelm of we got it all, and then through your other business, Through, uh, growth assistance.
Suddenly we have these people in Slack and I go, who are they? How do we get them on board? They're growth assistants hired from your previous company, brought in, who now are fully on board and are doing things like getting us on Twitter, creating images, creating landing pages for this, for this event.
Just boom, boom, boom. What else is out there that's, that you're doing with an entrepreneur when you're building together?
[00:35:35] Jesse Pujji: Yeah. I mean, one thing just to, to, for you to know Andrew, even, and you probably had it the best, right? , if you ask Casey, it was kind of a mess when we, we got it going. And if you ask Adrian, it
[00:35:46] Andrew Warner: from Ox Insights, the private equity advising company that you launched
[00:35:50] Jesse Pujji: Yeah. And Adrian, CEO of growth assistant. There was nothing. There was just Jessie and her like, so we, you know, the studio itself has been a thing that's been built.
Uh, and, and, and it's, we've made tons of mistakes in learning and, and we started a company that we shut down. I mean, you know, we've made a lot of mistakes along the way to get to the point where we think there's a decent, uh, part of it and a decent value prop. But I think the first thing is, I, the why for me is very strong.
Like you are the why for me. You're a very accomplished dude. I think, I love our energy, our chemistry together. and like you still use fear to motivate yourself a lot, and you're tough on yourself. And, and I don't, I look at you and I go, this is a guy I want to help grow and learn. I want to help. I wanna create space for him to be able to, to, and that's the same thing for Adrian and Casey.
And, and I, I very much feel strongly I care about you. And it's, it's a crazy thing actually in my own life. Like when I write down success for Bootstrap Giants, I notice my ego gets triggered. I notice that I start, I go, you know, I'm. I'm more in a state of like threat and I need to be right and I can't get this wrong.
And when I think of my job as helping Andrew be successful, I noticed that my heart opens up. I noticed that I'm going to care about your learning about your growth. Now it's the same thing technically, right? It's not different because if I make you successful, the company's going to be successful. So that's the starting point.
Okay. How do I make that person successful at building a business knowing all the things that I know? And then I think there's a handful of areas, right? And part of the thesis is like, There's a lot of people out there, yourself included, who there's a thing you want to do. You have a genius, you have a capability and you want to get it up and running and you want founder like economics for it, right?
For starting the company. But man, there's a bunch of shit you don't want to do. You don't want to deal with the bank accounts. You don't want to deal with setting up slack. You don't, and it's kind of like, I'm sort of building the product that I wish existed for me. That's the easiest way to think about it.
Like all of that logistical shit. I hate it. It's super important. Um, The finance and accounting, like I, it's all really, really important, but I don't want to spend my time and deal with it. And so we, we, all that stuff we set up. Then the other big thing is, well, hold on. I'm going to bring revenue revenue customers day one to the business so that that de risks the crap out of any venture, right?
You just don't have to have that problem. And that's going to make it much, much easier. And then obviously there are certain technical things or other stuff that Adam comes in and handle. So the three of us, and we, we've kept the overhead very low at Gateway X, as you know, it's three people there's, you know, and there's some studios who have 50 people at the studio.
I'd be shocked if we're ever more than 10 people at the studio, even when we're hopefully a huge, huge company generating tons of profit, because the companies really should be building for themselves. That's how I think about it. So Jesse brings marketing and sales and revenue and a ton of coaching. NAC brings all the operational and organizations and Adam brings technical and other, other sort of problem solving stuff. of course we expect the person running the business to, I describe it as operational delivery, whatever the thing is, the business doesn't in our case, content, right. And, and, and sort of sponsor management, some other things in the case of ox insights, actually doing the analysis and the projects for the private equity firms and Adrian's case, it's recruiting the growth assistants and account management and all that stuff.
So, so that's sort of the way that we've divided and conquered. And then obviously as a business gets bigger. It needs less of the studio, right? Uh, it has its own resources. It has its own people. And, and I don't know if you, you know, you, you met Nicole, the new COO of Ox, like
[00:39:09] Andrew Warner: Not only that, but I even talked to Nack before because Nack, your COO, who's now basically my COO, he was COO of Ox Insights, and I saw towards the end, he goes, This is way too much. They need their own person. This is way too much now because the company I didn't realize how much it had grown it since I started talking to you about it And yeah, you did bring in a new COO.
And so that that seems like a really good trajectory for me, too You're saying look we're gonna do all this for you Then we'll help you find someone else once we know what this means what the COO role is. We'll find someone with you.
[00:39:40] Jesse Pujji: Yeah. So that, that's what we've learned. And I think the other thing is we, we decided we're going to do one at a time. And I think that's partly because I love this part of the journey. Like I enjoy doing it like, you know, every year there's a new one and that's fun for me. And I think Too many at once.
We tried that early on and it was a disaster. Like you just can't two new companies at a time. At least for me, it was, it was just too difficult.
[00:40:04] Andrew Warner: I I also like the interaction with the two companies growth assistant Has great content. So I've been working with the person there. He's been going over some of our content He's been training the person that we hired. I like that knack has hired for a growth assistant And so when I said I like this one person, I don't know what we should pay.
He goes, I'll take care of that I've been doing this. This is an easy one for me And so he he handled that whole thing and make sure to get the
[00:40:31] Jesse Pujji: that's kind of, I mean, that's sort of the whole coach. Sometimes I call it a venture studio meets a holding company. There is a whole co element to it. Um, where like, again, my, you've heard me. My dream is that this is a huge thing with 20 operating businesses or 15 that we've all started together, that we all know each other, that there's a circle of Of all these leaders in it and, and it's just, it's a model where obviously you eat what you kill because you're running your own business, but you also get the benefit of all this other growth and development and partnership around the table.
[00:40:59] Andrew Warner: By the way, I'm looking I I've been so like On this making sure this technology doesn't break working on it. I didn't get a haircut yesterday All i'm doing is looking at what I now have very like waxy hair that I waxed it so it doesn't go crazy And then i'm looking at your freaking turban I go it must be great to be sick because you get a turban you don't have to worry about bad hair day I sometimes when I rush to get out I shave
[00:41:21] Jesse Pujji: worry about bad turban days, man. My turban looks all
[00:41:24] Andrew Warner: That doesn't look like a bad turban day
[00:41:26] Jesse Pujji: And
[00:41:28] Andrew Warner: Is it too Is it too personal to ask?
Like, what's the difference between when you wear a turban and then days when you're not on camera and you do the other thing?
[00:41:36] Jesse Pujji: Well, the other thing is me being lazy.
[00:41:38] Andrew Warner: What is the other thing? Is it, is it like, okay,
[00:41:41] Jesse Pujji: It's just like a do rag.
[00:41:43] Andrew Warner: and so is it not
[00:41:44] Jesse Pujji: Well, my hair is really long, right? I've never cut my hair. That's part of the faith. And it's, you know, as, as God made us. And, and it creates a physical discipline that leads to a spiritual discipline. And so my hair is long.
I brush it. It's, you know, it's, it's, my hair goes down to my butt. Um, my beard actually goes down to here too. It's just tied up right now. And, So the turban, you know, the, the, the original of the turban, it was, it was actually the regal attire of the 15th century in India. And Sikhism is big on everyone being equal.
It rejected the caste system. So it said, Hey, everyone be equal. And so we'll all dress like kings. So this is the way a king looked back in the day. Um, and so you're supposed to wear the turban every day. It's part of your identity. It's keeps you on the, and narrow, you know, it's, it's, it's your connection to God. so, but it takes me like 45 minutes to get dressed like this. If I like my, my beard's all fancy and my, it gets all hair sprayed and my turban's all nicely tied. And so days when I'm not on a podcast or hanging some big meeting with a private equity firm, I throw a do rag on and my beard's all bushy and I'm like, I'm just going to chill for that day and have internal conversations
[00:42:46] Andrew Warner: I see. And so that's
[00:42:47] Jesse Pujji: proud, I'm sure.
But yeah,
[00:42:49] Andrew Warner: not dressing like a king. And that's why you don't feel like this is, this is me being at my best. Got it. I didn't understand the
[00:42:55] Jesse Pujji: it's not, yeah, it's the uniform. It's like not wearing your uniform to play the game, you know, the game of life.
[00:43:01] Andrew Warner: I'm like that but with t shirts I tend to wear a t shirt like this and then when I have to get on with a client I will put on a nice shirt but we were like up to the last minute testing this out and so we didn't get to do that Pavel saying we need to have some kind of emoji with the beard I completely agree with you Why don't we, um, close it out with this actually two things first, let's give an example of like the path that we're working down with bootstrap giants in relation to like growth assistance.
So growth assistant is a model. Maybe you can use oxygen sites, but I feel like growth assistance is more relatable. How did it start out? How did you help grow it? And then where is it today? And then we'll talk about the vision for bootstrap giants and we'll close out today and call it a big win because look at this.
The
[00:43:43] Jesse Pujji: Yeah. Yeah. Again, a big part of how I start businesses is we go and we sell some stuff first. Like I, I'm not a big fan of discovery or one of the things I've learned is actually the best businesses. When you start with discovery, you end with revenue and that's a sign that it's a business people want.
And I think that's actually happened in all these cases. It didn't happen in Kahani, but it happened with growth. This isn't having a dog, having a bootstrap giants. Hey, would you be interested? Is this an interesting thing? And someone's like, where can I buy that? Where can I get that? And so with. With growth assistant, the first few months, you know, it's very counterintuitive.
I said, let's get a domain, let's put a one pager together about what we do. Like starting a, especially a services business, especially a B2B should take you a week because website takes a day. One pager takes a day, you know, a little bit of whatever, thinking about your, your offer. So that's what we do with growth assistant.
Then let's go talk to people and see if they'll, if they'll buy it. And within a month we had five people who want to growth assistants. We charged say three grand a growth assistant. Right. So that's 15 K a month. We make say a 50 percent margin. Right. So we had, we're like, okay, cool. We got enough money here to keep moving.
And it's similar to what we've done with our sponsors. Now we have enough money to, you're getting something we have, you know, we can pay other people, we can pay writers. And then I like to set goals. And you know, Andrew, we've talked a lot at you. Like I'm always going, where do we want to be in a month?
Where do we want to be in three months? And when you signed up, we agreed you and I in writing agreed. We said, okay. What would be awesome in three months? We have an engine where emails, social followers, LinkedIn are growing at a consistent rate of five, 10 percent a month. And that's a big part of my goal setting.
I don't set absolute goals. I set, I set goals where they're constantly in motion to grow. Okay. That would be great. Within 90 days of you starting also the sponsor dollar revenue is greater than one. We may lose a sponsor may gain a sponsor, but like overall they're growing and we know that they're happy with what we're doing.
And the third one was we have some. Uh, some idea for a bigger business, you know, whether that's TBD, right? Whether it's a, the content idea we were talking about earlier, whether it's memberships of something, we figured something else out, or we at least have an idea we want to go test. I think the fourth one was a podcast.
So then we have some very clear goals. We walk in and we start going and getting to get them done. And that's how we approach it. And I think that's how I've done it with all the businesses we've started, which is first in the first few months, go sell something and get it up and running and moving, and then start to set some targets and some goals against it.
[00:46:05] Andrew Warner: Okay. And so with growth assistance, it was, it's understanding that it's going to be a group of people who are sorry, it's going to be marketers who are looking for outsource growth, help people who are going to be able to do things like figure out the analytics on a site and create a report like we get from the growth assistant, create landing pages, create marketing. did that change from that initial vision to where it is today? It feels like it's basically the same thing.
[00:46:33] Jesse Pujji: It hasn't.
[00:46:34] Andrew Warner: It hasn't. So in that
[00:46:35] Jesse Pujji: it was a good idea.
[00:46:38] Andrew Warner: It's just more about now. How do we get more people? You haven't expanded beyond growth assistance to growth assistance and personal assistance or anything like that.
[00:46:44] Jesse Pujji: No, I think what we've learned, I think we've learned a lot, right? I think some of the surprises have been For some of our biggest customers, they, they like, once we're in there, they want us to be all over their business. They start asking us for roles that are not down kind of the fairway for us. But I think we've tightened our offering a lot.
And the way I think about the simple growth strategy there is, you know, if you, if you, you talk to someone, you go, go to Accenture, some of these big guys, they're selling a thousand heads to the big corporates, everyone's like, that's so competitive, you're never going to be able to compete, stay away from that.
And I think that's right. Even the companies out there that are, that are doing 50 heads or something, you go, well, eventually that's going to get big enough. They're going to want to do it themselves. And so where we've coalesced around is kind of the happy meal and you have part of the happy meal, I think, but it's like a reporting and campaign management person, a designer.
And like an outreach and admin affiliate, you know, affiliate influencer outreach. We think every e commerce business in the world needs those three roles and they should all be growth assistance, not us people. And then you look at the recent data. There's like 50, 000 or 10, 000, five to 10, 000 over 5 million revenue e commerce businesses out there.
And we're like, great. So let's go get a thousand of those, the three growth assistants of pop. It's small. They're small enough that they're not going to go direct to go recruit those people. Why would they do, it's just too much overhead to recruit three people. Now you're talking about a business with 3000 growth assistants.
That's a hundred million dollar business. And that's how I think of the growth trajectory, which is actually keep it quite narrow and dial it into to move forward and grow
[00:48:10] Andrew Warner: And where is it now? How many growth assistance or revenue?
[00:48:13] Jesse Pujji: 400 ish.
[00:48:15] Andrew Warner: 400 ish. What does that come out to revenue wise? So 400, that means you're 40 percent of your goal to get to a thousand.
[00:48:20] Jesse Pujji: said
[00:48:21] Andrew Warner: I know 3000 growth assistance. 1000 companies got it. Okay. And so revenue wise.
[00:48:28] Jesse Pujji: yeah, so it's a 15 million or something like that. A little bit less than that, I think,
[00:48:34] Andrew Warner: Okay. All right.
[00:48:36] Jesse Pujji: but it'll end the year for sure at 500. I think our stretch goal, 600 growth assistance.
[00:48:42] Andrew Warner: And they're still operating out of the Gateway X offices.
[00:48:46] Jesse Pujji: Well, it's most, I mean, all these companies are distributed in some way, but yes, there's a nexus here in St. Louis, as you know,
[00:48:53] Andrew Warner: All right. I think we're basically at the end. Is there anything that I missed that you would, that's top of mind for you? Mm-Hmm?
[00:49:03] Jesse Pujji: I think just that your invitation of, of like, this is more of a passion project than anything than any other business. I probably have ever started where I, there's a customer, people, people listening, I want to make this like a thing where someone walks around and goes, Hey, what are you working on? Oh, oh, you're raising venture money.
No, I'm a building a bootstrap giant. And I want that to start to be the thing that people say. And so I think any ideas around how we create that, what kind of content? I think we've written stories on Twitter about all these big companies. Maybe we need to go deeper on those. Um, I want there to be all of the same resources and libraries for the people who are building ambitious companies that grow off their own profits.
Thanks. Uh, and a big part of this podcast will be bringing on like the guys from Simple Modern or, you know, people who started SaaS companies that way. Like I want there just to be this amazing amount of knowledge and wealth for it. So any ideas or requests I think, please. Share them with me and Andrew because we we definitely want that.
You know, we want to build this. This is a passion thing
[00:49:59] Andrew Warner: Oh hell, hell yeah. That's absolutely it. I, um, you know, when I got from XRG, people like Fred Wilson, the investor as a guest, it wasn't because I reached out to him and got him, frankly, Fred Wilson said no to me. It was because there was someone who was in a building with Fred Wilson, the, the venture capitalist who'd been looking for a connection point with him.
He heard me say that I wanted to find more venture capitalists, specifically, uh, Fred Wilson to do an interview with me. And he goes, you know what? I'm in the elevator. What am I going to talk to him about? Let's say, hey, you should do this podcast episode. Fred Wilson said yes, he was on the episode, and things just went great for all three of us.
Um, and I'm going to say the same thing right now. We're trying to figure out who out there is a bootstrap giant that we should be paying attention to. I didn't know Simple Modern until I was in Jesse's car, and he happened to have this mug that was like pinkish mug with stickers on it. There it is. And I said, that's kind of interesting.
And he told me about the company. It's bootstrapped 200 million in sales. The founder is obsessive about giving money away. And the whole thing is just so interesting, but I didn't know about it because it's not being written about. So I'd love to hear from you if you're out there about that or anything else.
My email address is Andrew at Bootstrap Giants. Even if you do nothing but just send a hi message, I think it's super helpful. Kevin Espiritu is now this guy who's known for doing gardening videos and doing e commerce in the gardening space. He's blowing up. He was on My First Million and others.
Everyone wants a piece of him right now because he's doing this thing that's so interesting and producing a big business on top of it. I message him and he goes, Andrew, I'm a long time Mixergy listener. And I went into my inbox and sure enough found emails from him from over a decade ago. I'd love to be able to say the same thing when I look in my inbox at, uh, bootstrap Giants.
If you're out there and you're listening to us, just email me Andrew at bootstrap@bootstrappedgiants.com. Any ideas, suggestions, and anything else? Dude, this is working out great. I think we should do this on, on Twitter. Live in the future. You and I were experimenting. I think there are a couple of issues like I can see whenever it's stalling out the video for one of us.
I saw from people who are listening that there are a couple of other issues for them. Like it's blurry, but otherwise any what do you all think if you're out there? I see that the audience keeps growing. Hundreds and hundreds of people keep coming in as we go. If I talked another hour, more people come in, but please just like let me know.
How was this scale of 1 to 10? Give me a rating. And then if you have any input about stuff that didn't work or stuff that we could be doing differently, Put it in the chat, and I really appreciate it. Yeah, I can't wait for
[00:52:24] Jesse Pujji: Yeah, let's I think we should do it I think we should also push the envelope like let's take some of our private meetings on businesses And just do them on twitter live. Let's see what happens like people can see actually what it looks like It may be stupid too, but anyway
[00:52:44] Andrew Warner: Alright. I like that, and I think it just froze again on us. Alright, so I think this is a great way to leave it. If, uh, I gave you my email address, I'm gonna give you one other thing. We've been talking about the newsletters being the place that we build everything up. If you're interested, come to bootstrappedgiants.
com slash join. Brian is saying, uh, I don't know why I can see only five comments. I am seeing hundreds of comments, but maybe it starts off from when you are. I appreciate that. Michael is giving it an eight. Thank you. Jaris, episode was great. Thank you, buddy. I appreciate hearing from you again. Uh, love to tune in once a week.
That's a good point, to make it kind of a habit for people. I can only see the last three messages. Kalachi is saying, that's kind of a Twitter quirk. I'm gonna see if we can figure that out. Jesse's video is clear. It's just yours Andrew that's causing issues. Okay, it's possible that I'm trying to do
[00:53:29] Jesse Pujji: your shit together andrew.
[00:53:31] Andrew Warner: It's also possible I don't have my shit together. Alright, fair point. Um, thank you all. I'm going to put the link here in the, in the chat if you want to come bootstrappedgiants. com slash join if you want to follow along as we build this business and help other people build their business. Thanks everyone.
Thanks Jesse.
[00:53:49] Jesse Pujji: All right. See you guys
[00:53:51] Andrew Warner: Bye.