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Rob Walling is the man behind products like HitTail, DotNetInvoice, and Drip. But he also helped start a movement of micropreneurs: solo-founders, who launch their own products. These small startups don’t take venture funding and don’t hire employees. In this part 1 of our interview you’ll hear how he went from consulting, to building products full-time. Learn how you can acquire a product (instead of building it yourself) and why the code is less valuable than the product marketing.
Show Notes
Rob Walling is the man behind products like HitTail, DotNetInvoice, and Drip. But he also helped start a movement of micropreneurs: solo-founders, who launch their own products. These small startups don’t take venture funding and don’t hire employees. In this part 1 of our interview you’ll hear how he went from consulting, to building products full-time. Learn how you can acquire a product (instead of building it yourself) and why the code is less valuable than the product marketing.
“Building something people want is not enough”, says Rob “you have to be able to market it at a cost less than what the customer will pay you back over time.”
He also talks about how to launch products if you’ve already started a family (wife, kids, and a mortgage).
Rob and Mike Taber host podcast that you’ll want to check out: Startups For the Rest of Us.
Show notes
Creators and Guests
What is Product People?
A podcast focused on great products and the people who make them
Hey! Do you want to know how to go from consulting to building products full time? Well, then I have a treat for you. Rob Walling is on the program today. He's behind products like HitTail and really helps start a movement of micropreneurs, solo founders who launch their own products.
Speaker 1:This is part one of our conversation where you'll hear his story. So stay tuned. Hey, welcome to Product People, the podcast for people who build and sell their own products. My name is Justin Jackson. That's MIJustin on Twitter.
Speaker 1:And I've got to tell you, I'm a big fan of our guest today. It's always fun when you can have a guest on the show for whom you're a fan. Rob Walling is here to talk about launching a product. Rob is a big advocate of the Solo Founder philosophy and has launched a number of products. His current product is HitTail at hittail.com.
Speaker 1:And he's just recently announced a new product that he's preparing to launch called Drip. And you can see the landing page for that at getdrip.com. On top of all that, he blogs at softwarebyrob.com and podcasts at startupsfortherestofus.com. Welcome to the show, Rob.
Speaker 2:It's a pleasure to be on here. Thanks for having me, Justin.
Speaker 1:You're welcome. Now, I wanted to start with your history because you have it seems I don't think I even listed a third of what you actually have in terms of total products. How did you get into building products in the first place?
Speaker 2:Well, getting into products came out of this this desire to own something, to actually have equity in in something beyond this consulting firm, which is worth, you know, the the price of the stamps that I had on my desk at the time. I mean, it doesn't scale. It has no no real long term value. And I I looked down the line when I was about 29 or 30 and realized that I didn't wanna be running that consulting hamster wheel when I was 50 or 55. It just it didn't appeal to me at all, and I realized that, the only way to do that is to get some ownership in something.
Speaker 2:And so I had actually looked I had invested in real estate for a few years thinking that, you know, that I could build up kind of a a stream of income and and equity in homes. And that actually worked out reasonably well, but it was very, very slow going. There's a lot of competition. And I didn't have a unique advantage, you know, to to kind of getting out ahead of people. I didn't have, you know, a bucket of money or or just any any real advantage over others.
Speaker 2:And so I eventually, realized that my my skill was in software and startups. And so I really had it once I had one success with that, showed me that I could duplicate that success. And that was where the initial desire to get into products came from.
Speaker 1:And what was that first success that you had?
Speaker 2:The first success was a product called dot net invoice, and I still own that. And it's it's pretty simple. It's web based invoicing software. It's written in dot net, Microsoft's, you know, programming stack. It's downloadable software.
Speaker 2:So it's like FreshBooks is software as a service, whereas dot net invoice is something that someone buys, downloads it, runs it on their own server. So the market was actually decent market before FreshBooks came out. Since then, Dot Net Voice still sells to a small niche, but it's definitely not, you know, not the the product success that it once was. But it does sit there ticking in the background. It's one of my I think I have about 10 products now that that I sell.
Speaker 1:Oh my goodness. Okay. And with so what was the genesis behind dot net invoice? How did you get that idea?
Speaker 2:Dot net invoice was actually I acquired it when it was in alpha. So there were these two developers who had who knew how to write code. And I had launched about, I think, five products over the past five years, five or six years. This is from February, well, about '99 until 02/2005. And I had launched like a social news side.
Speaker 2:I had just spent tons of time and a big chunk of money trying to find a niche, trying to find something that that worked and a product that brought in some money, and and nothing was working. And so I was on some forums, and it was it's SitePoint, and these guys had posted that they had a code base and they had a few customers, but they didn't know how to market it and they were looking for a partner. So I got in touch and I let them know I wasn't interested in partnering, but I would consider buying the whole code base. And as it as it turns out, I did buy it, and it was the code was not in great shape. It had a lot of it had, like, showstopper bugs and all kinds of stuff.
Speaker 2:But I took it from there and and basically brought it through to beta, brought it through to launch, and then, you know, built it up from there using using the marketing approaches that I still use today.
Speaker 1:Interesting. Now, can you tell me how how much did you pay for
Speaker 2:that code base? I paid $11,000.
Speaker 1:Okay. In retrospect, does that seem like a good deal or a bad deal?
Speaker 2:It I overpaid for it a little bit. I mean, it seems like a good deal because if I hadn't done that, I don't know that I would be where I am now. But on its own, it was not not a great purchase price. I probably should have paid closer to about $56,000. But there were a couple things.
Speaker 2:There was some discrepancy in the revenue, and the previous month, it had sold several $100 worth. And I didn't really know how products were valued. And, you know, now I would I would certainly have made a lower offer. But at the time, I looked at the product and it was probably three to four hundred hours worth of work, and I was billing over a $100 an hour. So in my head, was like, man, this thing's worth $30.40 grand at least.
Speaker 2:You know, it's it's a deal to get it at that at that price, but that's not that's not the right way to look at it at all. Yeah. The right way to look at it is how how big of a market does it have, you know, and how does it have recurring traffic, and do they already have happy customers, that kind of stuff.
Speaker 1:Yeah. And when you were initially valuing that product, were you thinking this is going to be worth something because you saw that there was a clear market and a clear product market fit? Or were you just looking at the code and the work that had been done and thought, there's a lot of value just in the code, that's what I'm buying?
Speaker 2:I liked it because it did have a market. It had a clear market. The the whole concept of product market fit didn't exist back then. It was 02/2005. But I did know that they had they had basically pre sold a bunch of customers, and these customers were kind of clamoring for it and were really, you know, I don't know, interested in it.
Speaker 2:And they had sold, I think, like $800 the previous month. And they kinda represented that that was what it sold every month, but that they, you know, they that wasn't the case. It had really been like a a prelaunch sale that had brought in that much revenue. And that's a rookie mistake I had made not really taking the time to verify before then. But I I saw some value in the code, but to be honest, I really did see more value.
Speaker 2:And today when I make an acquisition, the code is actually way, way less valuable than whether or not the product is actually making money, whether it has, like you said, problem solution fit, product market fit. Those things are by far more important, in my book today.
Speaker 1:Interesting. So if you were going to start over, you would be thinking about marketing before you were thinking about code.
Speaker 2:That's correct. Yeah, because having a a big chunk of code that does something doesn't really help you unless it does something that solves people's problems. And not only that, because building something people want is not enough. You have to build something people want and be able to market it at a cost less than what you get back from that customer during their lifetime. And those are the two key things that you're looking for.
Speaker 2:Solve a problem, be able to get it in your customer's hands for less than they will pay you back during their lifetime.
Speaker 1:Interesting. And why do you think that we get that wrong so often? Why do we start with so for a developer, a developer might be thinking, I'm going to start with code. A designer might think, I'm going to start with a logo. And a business person might think, Well, I'm going to start with a great idea.
Speaker 1:If the true value of a product is in, will people pay for it? And can I make enough money off of it to pay for all the the marketing expenses? Why do we often get that wrong?
Speaker 2:I think because we're builders. Like, we're most of the entrepreneurs you know, whether they are developers, designers, or or business folks, as you said, they're creators. And we want to create things, and that's the really exciting part is the creation. And so if you come up with an idea, you naturally love tend to love your own ideas, and you think they're genius and you just wanna get to the fun part, which is creating the logo, writing the code, or fleshing out the idea as the business person would do. Mhmm.
Speaker 1:Yeah. So let's let's go back to your story. After .net invoice, what what was your next big product where you you had some success?
Speaker 2:After.net invoice, I realized that I didn't have to build everything myself. That was the first time I'd really acquired something and had any success. And after spending literally hundreds and hundreds, if not thousands of hours over the previous five years launching things, I realized that given that I was making good money as a consultant and I was booked full time, that perhaps I could think about acquiring some products just to to cut down on my time to market. Right? I didn't wanna spend launch a product every twelve months because that's what I've been doing, just spending all these nights and weekends coding.
Speaker 2:And I wanted to to shortcut that avenue. So what I did for a couple of years was acquire things. And I acquired code bases and products from people who didn't really know how to market them. And by that time, I had just enough success that I was just a little bit dangerous. And I purchased let's see.
Speaker 2:The next couple ones that I bought, one was called CMS Themer, cmsthemer.com. That's still around. And it was actually a theming service. It was kind of like productized consulting. So it was, you could come with this was kind of before a lot of the PSD to HTML services.
Speaker 2:And so you could come with a PSD file, Photoshop file, and I had some folks on the back end that I outsourced to, and I would just take the PSD and we turned it into either a WordPress theme or a Drupal theme or Joomla and then get it back to them. And the margins were fantastic. And my goal at this point, to be honest, was not to build, you know, this fantastic 100 company. My goal was to make just enough money that I could stop consulting. That was the goal because I because I was working so I was working full, you know, full time during the day.
Speaker 2:I had a wife and a kid at home and a mortgage, and then I was doing these products on the side. And so that meant four plus hours a night, that meant weekends, And I just needed to get to the point where I could quit consulting and I knew that things would open up in terms of time and even revenue. Because once I had so much more time to invest in them, I knew I could grow faster. So that was the goal. And I was buying purely based on where I thought I could get these products to.
Speaker 2:CMS Themer was one and that was a stepping stone for me. It was not and I knew it. I knew I didn't wanna have CMS Themer for ten years because it was kind it was still on that border, right, of kind of being a little bit of consulting hamster wheel ish stuff. You're still doing project management and and dealing with clients, but it was a great thing that I owned, I think, for about a year and it helped me helped me quit the job and then or quit the consulting gig. And then once I replaced that income, then I sold CMS Themer and and I did well with that as well with the sale.
Speaker 1:Interesting. What you you mentioned that you had you were married and you had a kid and a mortgage. It seems that a lot of the startup talk we hear is about single, young, white males. There I know there's a lot of talk about, you know, maybe folks that are married and have a mortgage and, you know, have a family maybe shouldn't get into building products. What's your take on that?
Speaker 2:Well, you're right. There is the kind of the stereotypical kid that's just out of college or, you know, maybe in college or in grad school and and has tons of time to invest into building these kind of shoot the moon product ideas. It's it's maybe the Y Combinator fallacy, I'll say. That's not a bad thing. If I was 22 and I wasn't married and I had all the time in the world, I probably would, you know, move to the Silicon Valley, try to raise funding and go for a moon shot.
Speaker 2:It's like, what do you have to lose at that point? Mhmm. But the thing is, there are so many of us. There are so many of us that are 27 between 27 and and 50 years old who are developers, designers, and business people, and who do have that wife, kid, and mortgage, and still want to be creative, and still wanna do interesting things, and build things that we have ownership of. Things that we are proud of, and that's not just what your client tells you to build, and the client then walks away with the ownership.
Speaker 2:You know? It's like building something that's gonna, you know, last your lifetime, potentially outlast you. And that group just turned out to be very, very big. And I didn't know that that group existed when I I really started blogging heavily about that in 02/2006, 02/2007, and I was just looking for other people like me who were who weren't gonna move to the Bay Area, who weren't gonna raise funding, and who weren't gonna kinda forgo the rest of their lives going after this lottery ticket a startup. And as it turns out, there are a lot of us, and that's why, you know, we started the podcast, we have a conference now.
Speaker 2:I mean, there's thousands. There's probably four or 5,000, listeners to our to our podcast, and there's, I don't know, 20 something thousand people subscribed to my blog. So while it's certainly not as large as the kind of go big startup group, there is definitely this idea definitely resonates with, you know, the idea of of starting a startup, it resonates with a lot of of people.
Speaker 1:And what was your what was your strategy? So you you acquired.net invoice. You were having some success with that, you were still consulting. How did you talk to your spouse about that? How did you say, I'm going to try this thing, which I'm sure at the time seemed ridiculous because the way people earn an income is they go to work and they get a salary or if you're a consultant there's at least this direct line between the work I do and the income I How did you talk to your wife about that and what are some strategies you think for families that are thinking about maybe getting into building products?
Speaker 2:That's actually a question. And one I'm not asked enough, to be honest, because your spouse or significant other is gonna be critical, absolutely critical to your success. If they don't have buy in and they're always down talking your idea or the fact that you're working on products, it is gonna make it 10 times harder for you to succeed. So I'm I'm glad you asked that. My my wife and I had talked many times since '99 when I first said I'm gonna build something on the side.
Speaker 2:And she had set up some pretty good boundaries. She said as long as it doesn't have like a major majorly impact our lives in terms of, you know, you don't bet the farm on it, so we're gonna go bankrupt or lose the house. As long as you're not working so much that we can't go out and have fun and, you know, that you don't spend time with me. I mean, we kinda set up some some boundaries that I stuck within. And she had seen the failures that I'd had, but she'd also seen that some of them succeeded enough that she knew I was making progress.
Speaker 2:So she was able to watch that journey. And in 02/2005, after five, six years of doing it, when she saw me have this for success and, you know, dotting her voice back then, it started bringing in a thousand bucks a month, and then $2,000 a month, and then $3,000 a month. And this was in addition to to consulting income that was already more than than I needed to live on. I showed her that and said, look, I finally think I'm figuring this out. I'm gonna kinda take a run at this, and I am gonna work more.
Speaker 2:I'm not gonna risk everything, but I'm gonna put some more time in because I think if I get a nut what if I get two more of these going like two more products going like this, it's not what I make consulting, but I can at least quit quit consulting for now and then replace the rest of the income later. And she was willing to buy into that. But it was only because I'd had the success. Right? If I had talked that pipe dream in '99, she it wouldn't have made sense and it wouldn't have made sense for me to do that.
Speaker 2:So she was actually a good reality check for me, you know, in in the fact that I had to convince a partner. Right? I had to convince kind of a cofounder, if you think about it, to buy into my idea. And and then moving forward, I had successes pretty consistently after that and it became an easy choice for her. And
Speaker 1:I'm guessing that maybe in part two we'll talk about the strategy for choosing a good idea and a good product. Because I imagine, like you said, between 'ninety nine and 02/2005, you were working away on these ideas. And I think a lot of spouses that are in tech, we're always working on side projects. Sometimes our spouse can get the feeling of, this is kind of a non stop side project parade. When are we going to have something that actually has some success?
Speaker 1:So maybe we can talk about some specific tactics in part two.
Speaker 2:Sure. Sounds good.
Speaker 1:So CMS Themer, what was after that? What was kind of the next big thing after that?
Speaker 2:Around that time, well, there was no big thing really. Was a collection of small things. And that actually became my approach was to collect a lot of small products and build a portfolio of them. Someone once used the term, he has his own personal conglomerate because I just collected these random assortment of of apps. Next one was just beachtowels.com.
Speaker 2:It was an ecommerce website that sold beach towels.
Speaker 1:How did how did you get the idea for this?
Speaker 2:Again, it was it was up for sale and it ranked high in Google. It ranked on the first page of Google for a generic keyword, which was beach towels. And I knew that I could get it ranking higher, and at the time, it wasn't selling anything. It wasn't it just was a splash page or a landing page. And well, it was a couple pages of HTML, but there was no buy now button.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:So I knew if I got it, I could put a card on it. I could find a drop shipper and and see where it went. And I genuinely didn't know, is this gonna do a thousand dollars a month in beach towels? Is it gonna do 20,000 a month? Because no one had any revenue on it.
Speaker 2:So I pay but I didn't pay very much. I think I paid a thousand bucks or something. And it was worth the risk for me to find out. And that was it. And that was a lot of hustle.
Speaker 2:Right? I've put in a ton of time. And in the end, it wasn't actually that lucrative. The the site peaked when I owned it. It peaked somewhere around three gosh.
Speaker 2:I think it was three thousand, four thousand dollars a month in sales, but it's it's hard goods. And so the profit margin is small. So I only made maybe netted I had a VA who was processing orders. I mean, I had all this stuff going on, but I learned so much. I learned a lot more about SEO.
Speaker 2:I learned how to have a VA do things, how to automate stuff. That was really the first time I'd done that. I took away all this stuff even though it only made maybe 500 a month. And again, I used that to leverage. I I sold that and used it to leverage into the next products and which from then on really were software.
Speaker 2:I decided to stick to digital products after that because the dealing with returns and physical products was not my cup of tea.
Speaker 1:Yeah. And again, back to maybe your personal and family life. So justbeachtowels.com, you know, that does sound like a lot of additional work. You know, from that point on, did you really start to examine, you know, here's the purchase price, here's what I think I can get out of it, but also here's how much time this is going to take?
Speaker 2:I did. I did have a better concept moving forward because that was my third kind of rehab. Right? I did .net, it was CMS Themer and Just Beach House, and I had a much, much better idea of how much time an idea would take to take from where it was to where I wanted it to be. But by this time, to be honest, I had already I had enough income that I started cutting back on consulting.
Speaker 2:And I started consulting four days a week, and that freed up just enough time that it didn't impinge on my time with my family. And I think I eventually went back to three days a week and then eventually cut it once I had enough revenue.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Okay. So let's go into what was the next thing after just beach towels?
Speaker 2:There were a couple more in the meantime. I mean during this time I realized I was having some decent success with this and I had some stuff that I wanted to pass on information for other developers. And so I blogged more about it. I wound up writing a book on the topic, which I was doing more to communicate, to answer a lot of questions I was getting on the blog and to communicate to help other developers, that actually turned into an un kind of an unanticipated income stream. The book, I've I've talked to a couple publishers and decided I wanted more control they were willing to give, and that wind up so I wind up self publishing it.
Speaker 2:And it has sold 10,000 copies over the past two and a half years. And so that was another, you know, one of those it was like, oh, the harder I work, the luckier I get, is the phrase I use. You know? It was it was a bit of luck. It was unexpected, but I wrote a book too.
Speaker 2:I did spend the three months to do it. So that was kind of a nice, you know, add on success to this. The next two software products were Wedding Toolbox, which I still own, and that helps, engage couples build wedding websites. It's just like Squarespace for wedding websites. And then Apprentice Lineman Jobs, which is a job board for, power line electricians.
Speaker 2:And I bought that one mostly based on existing traffic and she didn't really know how to monetize it. So I was just improving the funnel on that.
Speaker 1:So you talked about launching this blog and then launching a book. And that's something that a lot of product folks are trying to do right now is, okay, I'm going to start blogging more, I'm going to start an email list, I'm going to write a book. Can you talk about what kind of uptake did you have when you started blogging? So when you started, you started at zero visitors, zero views And per how quickly did those numbers grow?
Speaker 2:Not very quickly at all. It was absolutely painful. I started blogging in 2005 and there was no Facebook, no Twitter. There weren't social sharing sites at all. So I think Dig was just kind of becoming big.
Speaker 2:And after six months, I had 66 RSS subscribers. After six months of blogging, three three days a week. And after a year, I had 250 RSS subscribers. So I I measured everything by the number of subscribers, not by the number of page views. Because I could get a big hit and go to the front page to dig and get forty, fifty thousand visits in a couple days.
Speaker 2:And that was exciting, but it didn't translate into any type of long term readership. So after a year with two fifty, I was discouraged, but I knew that long term, this this is what I do. I I do things and then I share them with people. I mean, that's just how I've I've always been. I I enjoy helping others.
Speaker 2:I also enjoy kind of forwarding, you know, pushing our whole the conversation forward. And so as I discovered this thing of both acquiring products, which I'd never heard anyone talk about, acquiring smaller software products, and having a portfolio of of products, and going from developer to basically entrepreneur slash marketer, I realized I had three kind of unique viewpoints. And I think that's a critical piece. If you're thinking about starting a blog, writing a book, doing any of that, you do have to have something unique to say because everyone's doing it now, you know? And so if you don't have something unique to say and you just wanna blog, say, about starting your your company, that's that's been done.
Speaker 2:That was really interesting in, like, 2004 when people blogged about starting their company because no one was doing it. But if you don't if you're just saying, oh, today I'm trying to get this company started, it's like, it's not interesting enough yet. You you need you need a voice and you need a unique, kind of a unique angle on it.
Speaker 1:So once you decided, I have these three unique perspectives and I'm going to share these perspectives, was it still kind of a steady climb in terms of building your own personal audience? Or did did you see some spikes? Do you get to a tipping point?
Speaker 2:I did get to a tipping point. And to be honest, early on between 02/2005, 02/2006, I blogged a little bit about entrepreneurship, but it was more about being a corporate developer and, I don't know, consulting. I mean, it was just kind of I was trying to find what it is that I really like talking about and what it is people wanted to hear about. And once I figured out, once I did start having those successes as as a founder or an entrepreneur, that was my tipping point. And it was in 2007 that things really started ticking up.
Speaker 2:And I think I started 2007 with about 2,500 RSS subscribers, so it was like two years to get there. And then I doubled that, and then I doubled it again in
Speaker 1:a So
Speaker 2:I doubled it to five in about a year, about nine months and then I doubled it to 10 over the next year. So you definitely see there was growth. Now, Twitter also came out around then. There were some other things that helped that, but oh, and Hacker News was a big one. Like I said, all my posts started going to Hacker News.
Speaker 2:So there was there were other factors that played into that, but to be honest, the entrepreneur community and the founder community is it is a tight group, it was it was just a more focused niche than what I had before, which was, like I said, blogging about consulting and, you know, kinda being a corporate developer and just politics and project management and that kind of stuff. It isn't I don't think it's as interesting to people.
Speaker 1:And how much did your you mentioned real life experience, so once you had some actual product wins under your belt, Did you say that contributed to, you know, the number of people that were kind of actively seeking you out and becoming regular readers, etcetera?
Speaker 2:Oh, absolutely. Because then I had it wasn't just talking theory at that point. I think the my first big post that really went viral and drove a lot of folks to to subscribe to the blog was called the inside story of a small software acquisition. And this was a couple years after I had purchased dot net invoice, but I basically detailed that entire process that I've, you know, just told you about was buying it, rehabbing it, all the thought process. I think I may even made it a three part series.
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 2:That drove a lot. And this was, again, a couple years after it had actually happened, but I finally felt comfortable documenting it and just putting it all out there. This is the first time being pretty open about what I was up to. I'm much more open now just because I'm more comfortable doing so. But that was a big thing because it's a unique story.
Speaker 2:No one's talk you know, no one talks about these small software acquisitions. Instantly, I got emails, people asking me to guest post on their blogs, some fairly successful blogs in the niche, were were just interested in hearing what was going on with this guy who no one had ever heard of at the time, just that I was doing something that was in fact unique. I wasn't just talking about the theory of doing it, I just had real numbers and real experience.
Speaker 1:Maybe in part two we can talk about the tactics behind that because there's this idea it's the old chicken and egg or horse and cart problem, which is how do you launch a product successfully when you don't have anyone to launch to? But on the other hand, the launches helps create an audience. So maybe we could talk about that in part two. Let's close off this part with talking about HITTail. How did HITTail come about?
Speaker 1:And what's the story behind that?
Speaker 2:Sure. Was about eighteen months well, maybe about two years ago. I I realized something about myself that I enjoy working on things really hard and focusing and building and creating, and then I enjoy stepping away. And so that's why I do have this portfolio of product is because I don't wanna be I will never I don't think I'll ever be the one product guy, you know, that I own the same product and that's my identity for the next fifty years. And so about every eighteen months, I'm expecting myself to get restless and that I need to figure out a way to basically these days, I I automate.
Speaker 2:I either have a I have a bunch bunch of virtual assistants who are able to take care of products or I now have a product manager who does a lot of work for me. And so I realized this couple years ago and started looking for my next app. And I was either gonna build it from scratch or acquire it. And HitTail is an app that had been around since 02/2006, and I had been a customer of it since then. And what it does is it looks at your website's existing traffic, and it pulls out the keywords that you have a really good chance of ranking for, that you're not already ranking well for.
Speaker 2:And so instead of getting 500 keywords in Google Analytics, you get maybe 20 keywords. It it it'll give you that whole list of 500, but then it'll give the you the 20 and they'll say, these are the suggested ones, the recommended ones. And so I had used that for blog post suggestions, for SEO content, for all kinds of ideas over the years, and the site was having issues. It it hadn't been maintained very well and it started having outages every other month or so. And it had a four or five day outage in early it was about mid twenty eleven, and I decided that I was gonna email the owner.
Speaker 2:And I had cold emailed people in the past to acquire apps and typically never received a response. And sure enough, you know, it was a sweet spot. And again, it was harder I work, the luckier I get. It it was just a it was lucky that she was willing to sell it. It had just kinda grown long in the tooth.
Speaker 2:And so we negotiated for a couple months via email, and we decided, you know, decided it was it was a good move. And so I closed on that in September 2011. Yeah. That's right. September 2011.
Speaker 2:And that was all I mean, was all funded with it wasn't a huge acquisition in terms of cost, and it was all funded in from my other apps. So it's not like, you know, it's come from some trust fund. It was it was building up over time and having these apps generate enough revenue to then acquire the next thing and go a little bigger.
Speaker 1:And and can you give us a picture of, you know, your in terms of revenue, what do each of these products kind of provide to the overall pie?
Speaker 2:It's a very wide range. Some of them I mean these days I don't bother. I I kinda I mean some of them are are as small as, you know, a thousand a month and some are as high as in the 15 to 20,000 range.
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 2:And that's kind of that's as wide as it swings, and it depend it honestly depends on the month too. Some apps do have huge months during Christmas time, some have huge months during tax time, you know, based on which app it is. But that's that's the idea.
Speaker 1:And how do you organize all of this? Do you how do how do you manage all of these these different products?
Speaker 2:It it sounds overwhelming, but if you think about that I built this over the course of seven years, it has been a very slow and deliberate move, and I have I have essentially brought on help. I don't have employees, but I have in any given month, have between six and eight contractors who work for me. Some of them have worked for me for five or six years. Some of them work full time, forty hours a week. Others work maybe five hours a month on an as needed basis.
Speaker 2:But they range from I have three virtual assistants. I have a product manager who is a jack of all trades, designer developer, DBA. He, you does everything. I have a DBA, I have a designer, I have a c s CSS slicer. These are all people that are kind of I just have relationships with.
Speaker 2:And I can email and say, hey, need something really quick by tomorrow, you know, this thirty minute project, and they'll get it out for me. And then others are doing recurring tasks. A lot of the VAs handle my tier one email support, handle all the things that you'd imagine would take a lot of your time. I have put those into processes and essentially outsource them. I don't wanna, I'm not a big, like, hey, I outsource my life, you know, on that bandwagon, but I genuinely have a suite of people who, you know, work three hundred to four hundred hours a month total that allows me to do this because I obviously, I couldn't, you know, I don't I don't even work half that.
Speaker 2:I don't even work half of 300 in a month.
Speaker 1:Wowzer. That wraps up part one of my interview with Rob Walling. We've got so much, so much coming up in part two that you're going to want to tune in for next week, including how to hire a VA, how to do marketing, and how to build your personal brand. Tune in next week. In the meantime, check out productpeople.tv and also check us out on iTunes.
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