Transcript
Roman Paisakovich, welcome to the show. Thank you. Let’s let’s kick things off with something pretty spicy What is your most controversial opinion about building a SaaS business? Most controversial.
Okay, so I would say my most controversial opinion on that is that not everybody should do it You know, I think it’s uh, we’re living in times right now where it’s the cool thing to do It’s the fun thing to do. It’s the encouraged thing to do And I think there’s a large population that should do it, but at the same time I also think there’s a large population that shouldn’t for many different reasons But yeah, I think that’s I think right now.
It’s just it’s the hot thing and everybody wants to get in the business Yeah, my opinion is that it’s not for everyone So talk me through that a little bit more like what who who should Build a SaaS business or who should build a business in general and who should not Yeah, good question, so I think with just building any business in general there comes this aspect of Knowing what you know the business that you’re building knowing all the ins and outs of it But on top of that a lot of people neglect the actual skill set of building a business Regardless of what business it is.
So you have a lot of people who are so passionate about their product whether it’s software service You know direct-to-consumer product and they want to sell that product. They believe in the product But then they don’t really look into you know, what what does it mean to build a business?
What does it mean to build a sales team a marketing team a finance team? How do I run this thing? what does it mean to be a CEO and That I think is is the part that gets neglected a lot and a lot of people that I talked to they end up you know having this passion for a product or service and they sell and Then all of a sudden fast forward and they just lose everything because they’re like I don’t Sign it about the product anymore.
I’m running a company. I’m managing people It’s a whole different thing and they put themselves in a manager role or CEO role and so yeah You know just to kind of model a little bit. I think the biggest thing is just people
to understand what it takes to actually run a company regardless of what it is that they’re selling. I think I’ve seen that happen so often in food a lot of people like cooking food so they think cool I’ll start a restaurant not realizing that that involves really early mornings, really late nights, no weekends, managing team members, dealing with staff turnover like that all the all the other stuff that goes with building a business is just forgotten about.
Yeah a good buddy of mine has loved pizza so he opened up a pizza shop and then the pizza shop turned into three pizza shops now they’re franchising other buildings whole pizza empire and it’s like you know I wonder if he has the same love for pizza now that he did back then.
What do you feel like for dinner tonight? Anything but pizza. Anything but pizza that’s right. So let’s talk about your business a bit more now what is Clean Go and who is it for?
Yeah so Clean Go is on the outside a commercial cleaning company where we provide cleaning to four offices across the country. If you dig in a little bit more we’re actually more of a platform where we basically help you as a customer manage cleaners, manage the cleaning, pay invoices, we give you a rep, we give your own like we’re kind of your in-house dedicated cleaning team that’s on our Clean Go platform.
And what is what is your ideal customer look like? Yeah so any office that needs I mean any office across the country it needs our services. You know they have someone come in whether it’s once a week, twice a day, people outsource their janitorial. Our ideal customer is more of a company that wants like an ease kind of a more modern feel to it.
A lot of our clients are in these kind of tech bubbles. Austin, New York City, San Francisco and you know they’re getting the same service as you one of our competitors but they just have this platform in this online you know ease using our platform and we’re just basically trying to modernize the whole commercial cleaning industry.
I love that because I think that there’s so many people are you know building yet
yet another mousetrap and there’s so many industries that are really old and archaic and there’s a real opportunity there if you have something a bit more modern and a much easier kind of technologically advanced way of doing things. Did, talk me through COVID, surely that affected your business in a pretty big way.
Yeah, for sure. So we actually launched our business, didn’t lose, but almost lost. We launched our business two weeks before COVID started. So our ideal customer is basically an office manager, anybody at the office.
So we launched this business, we’re super pumped. We like turn on the switch, SEO goes to work, ads go to work. We’re getting foreign submissions on our website. Two weeks later, the entire world shuts down and nobody is at the office anymore.
So we basically died. When it was probably the worst thing that could have happened just to go back a little bit, we were planning our whole business. We were like, this is one of the most, like nothing could happen that would stop this business. You know, this business has been around forever, leading, I mean, it’s forever.
And then it’s gonna just go on forever. People are gonna outsource more and more stuff. Nobody wants to do this stuff in house. So there’s, we’re unstoppable.
Like we’re ready to go. We’re gonna raise funds, it’s gonna be huge. And then yet two weeks later, the whole world shut down. Every office went home and our ideal customer was just gone, locked up in a house, empty.
So it was challenging. However, we made a quick turn. We revaluated some things. People still started to reach out from these industries that were still open.
Grocery stores, schools, preschools, just certain things that still had to stay open. We were in demand even more for their services. And then we said, you know, what can we offer to them? Let’s learn about COVID.
Let’s learn about disinfection, cleaning. So we survived through that. It was crazy times. But yeah, our core business was just coming out.
meeting your office in Manhattan five days a week was just dead. It took a little bit to get back, but yeah, it was crazy times. How did you adapt? Like, did you pivot the business at all during COVID?
What did you do to survive that period? Hilariously, this is actually kind of a funny story. So at the time, everybody started searching for electrostatic disinfection. This was a keyword that started a trend on Google.
And what this is, basically, without getting into all the details and the chemistry, is it’s a sprayer. It’s like a gun, like a toy-looking gun that uses electricity, basically, to charge the chemicals that you put in it so that it could stick to services that you spray. So now we’re walking around.
People, they want to clean or disinfect their entire office. You can’t just walk around with a spray bottle and a rag. You’re walking around with these guns. You’re spraying things.
And people started searching for this. They started seeing this everywhere. CDC put out information on it. EPA did.
And this was deemed as an effective way to clean during COVID-19. So we basically said, let’s learn about these things. Let’s see if we can supply them. So we did some research.
We found out the top five, six brands that were making them. We got in touch with them. They were so busy, you couldn’t even get them on the phone. Their businesses exploded overnight.
Some of them to the value of hundreds of millions of dollars. Yeah, it was pretty crazy. And we were talking to these people. We said, we want to learn about this.
They didn’t really give us. They’re like, yeah, you and everybody else. Then we put up a blog post on our website called Top Six Electrostatic Sprayers. And we just listed them.
And I don’t know how we had someone on our team that was doing SEO. We basically outranked all of the companies that were selling these. EPA and CDC started to put out articles about this. We outranked them.
So when you search electrostatics brain, we came up as
number one, and we got, I think, maybe 100, 150,000 visitors to our site every single month. It was pretty crazy. Whoa. And they were just rolling in.
It was wild. So we actually ended up thinking, how could we make money off this? We partnered up with them. We started…
First, we started sending all the traffic to Amazon. So we set up a quick shop. We had no idea what we were doing. We were like, let’s just…
Amazon affiliates, quick. Let’s get this going. And we sent all the traffic to Amazon. Amazon was giving us a kickback from all the orders that came through.
And then these companies, who weren’t talking to us just a little bit ago, started to reach out to us. And they’re like, hey, can we be number one on your list? We’ll fly you out here. We’ll spot.
We’ll do whatever we need to do to get on your list. So then we partnered up with them. Long story short, we became a distributor. We started doing drop shipping.
And it was awesome. It was very, very cool. We sold tons and tons of these sprayers. And that kind of kept us afloat during COVID-19.
So in order to start a tech-enabled service business, you had to start an affiliate business, which turned into a drop shipping business, which then… This is the wildest loop. Cool. Cool.
Cool. It was so fun. It was a little bit fake. It was like a little bit of La La Land.
You’d just wake up and you’d be like, we sold $80,000 worth of sprayers yesterday. That’s crazy. In one day. It was just absolute insanity.
I remember driving. My wife and I took some trips somewhere and we were driving and we were on an eight-hour trip and every five minutes, I just kept looking at my phone. I’m like, we made $1,000. We made $10,000.
We made $20,000. It was like, it was a fantasy a little bit. Fast forward, I think about a year, a year and a half into all this, the CDC comes out and says, actually, we were wrong. These sprayers aren’t that good.
The chemicals inside of them do kill COVID-19, so it’s not like we’re good there, we’re using the chemicals to do that.
Then also at the same time, Google decides to come out with a new update because they want to be sure that CDC, EPA, and all these government organizations are going to outrank everyone. Our blog post got pushed to page seven of Google, and our business went to zero that exact day, and we haven’t got an order since then.
And that was it. Yep. It was fun. It was good times.
It was very, very good times. I learned a lot about dropshipping, purchase orders, working with these massive companies. It was very, very cool. But yeah, then we used that money to basically survive.
And the right they got right when that ended is when people started to return back to the office and need our actual core business. Right. So you went straight back into- Went straight back into our original cleaning platform, all that. Fantastic.
Where are you sitting right now in terms of revenue, team size, all that kind of stuff? Yeah. So we’re at a couple million dollars right now. We’re decently close to our goal.
Our big goal has always been to hit eight figures. Ten million dollars in revenue. Hopefully, we can get there in the next couple of years. That’s our plan.
We have a team of 13 right now, me, 13 people, and everyone’s remote. I’m actually the only one in the U.S. We’re in South America, Costa Rica, Philippines, all over. Fantastic.
Yeah. And then we manage just a big network of, I would say, probably a couple hundred vendors across the country. They’re performing the work and everything on our platform. Wow.
I wanted to give you a giant fist bump from across the internet because I saw that you posted a little while back in the Startup Source group that you’d recently signed your first million dollar a year client. So well done. That’s fantastic. But I wanted to ask you, that doesn’t just happen by accident.
So what is your secret sauce? How have you managed to build this? Yeah. That’s a great question.
Yeah. This was an awesome, awesome win for our company. We’ve been working on it for a while. I think one thing that we…
we weren’t doing early on was just referrals, asking our existing customer base, not, you know, a lot of people think you ask your existing customer base for, hey, can you refer me to someone else? But what about within your organization? Is there other units? Is there sister companies?
Is there other locations? Is there anybody else at your company that could benefit any other teams from using this? So that’s what we did, and we had a customer who was like, yeah, you know, we actually have another location. Do you want to do our other location?
And then they’re like, we actually have 10 other locations. Do you want to do those too? And we just got super scrappy, or, you know, we’re like, this is a lot going on at one point. They’re in cities that were really not fully up and running yet, but let’s make it happen.
And eventually they were like, well, I think we have 40 something locations now that want to just go to you guys and we’ll just give you everything. So that was really cool. And that actually, I traced back to where that original lead came from, and it was from Google ads.
So the joke is kind of like, we don’t have to look and see if Google ads, you know, costs, the customer acquisition costs, the payback period, obviously all that goes out the window because this customer just made it back a hundredfold. So yeah, I think that’s the thing that we’re starting to do now.
We’re starting to lean on our existing customer base. I think once you get into like, you know, obviously every software company and just every company in general has different sweet spots of like, hey, now we have a lot of customers, you know, tend to be a lot to one software company and a hundred to another.
But for us, it was crossing like the hundred customers. Once we reached past a hundred, we’re like, okay, now we have a base of customers that we could go and squeeze and see if they have anything else, see what we can do to them. We just started to just give basic replies like, sure.
Yeah. You want more business? Here you go. Best acquisition because it’s free.
You know, it’s just like, it was awesome. And there’s this whole trust system already. They already use you. It’s what you touch with someone.
So I think that’s our next big thing to continue to obviously use all.
marketing channel to try to grow, but also just lean in on our existing customer base to see how we can grow. Was that, was that a phone call? Was it an email that you sent out? Like, how did you actually encourage the, the referrals?
Yeah, it was actually one of our old sales reps. I think it was just an email. I think it was just email based and that was it. A lot of our customers for sure have multiple locations because we service, our customer is basically like a facility.
So a lot of our companies, people like us, like a lot of tech companies love us because there’s like this tech vibe, you know, to us. They’re like, Hey, this is a cleaning company. They’re the ones who are going to be doing our cleaning, but everything feels different.
Feels more modern. A lot of these tech companies have locations, you know, all over the place. So I think it was just an email in that case, but yeah, we’ve just been talking to our companies and saying, you know, you like us, you like our platform. What about your Texas office?
What about your, you know, Houston office, Houston, Texas, sorry. Um, you know, just across the country, like where else can we service you? Hmm. Gee, I wonder how many, uh, how many people watching this or listening to this, uh, leaving a lot of money on the table because they just never sent that email and never asked.
I think that’s, that’s a really easy quick win. Yeah, for sure. Yeah. Yeah.
We never did that early on. It was like, it felt weird. I think a lot of people, it feels really uncomfortable for them. For me too.
When I was doing sales early on, I’m like, I’m not going to ask you to do something for me. I’m, I’m the customer. And I think there’s this like weird, I don’t know. There’s this type of person, I guess I’m one of them where it’s like, it feels uncomfortable to ask anything from your customer you should be doing for your customer, even feedback.
Like I remember early on, we lost an account, a big one that I worked on forever and someone was like, ask them why? And I was like, no, that’s, that’s not appropriate. I’m not going to ask them why. Like I should be doing for them.
They shouldn’t do anything for me. I think that’s a wrong mindset. I mean, I, I was clearly proven wrong. You know, I think if you just ask, people are happy to refer.
I can’t, I can tell you the countless times people have asked me, Hey, can you leave a review for my business? Or like, sure. I don’t, you know, I don’t think, wow, this is.
weird, they’re asking me to do something. So I think in general, in the beginning, there’s this fear of like, oof, I don’t want that customer to churn. So let’s just leave them alone. Let’s, let’s not ask them for anything.
But I think that’s how you grow by asking and getting feedback and all that. And just getting really tactical for a moment, how, how do you phrase that? Is it literally just an email saying, you know, Hey, you know, if you’re really happy with our service, you know, would you mind referring us to, you know, do you have any other locations that you could refer us into there?
Is there anyone else in your organization or any sister organizations that we could, we could potentially work with? Is it, is it as simple as that? Yeah. So first we want to make sure that we’re good with the customer.
Like if someone just complained on us, we don’t want to be like, Oh, sorry, by the way, do you want, you know what I mean? So we do it with our, I’d like to say, you know, everyone’s happy with us, but we want to be sure that we’re, we actually use like compliments as a way to dive into that conversation.
Meaning we’ll do like a check-in and someone will say, everything’s been great. Five out of five, everything’s been going great. Then we’re like, awesome, by the way. And then we showed them that we did a little bit of research because then it’s not like lazy, like, Hey, what do you got?
Give me work. So right. And it shows that like we, we went on our end and did some research on you. It kind of makes them feel a little bit, not, not like, it’s not like a sneaky way to get them to respond, but they realize like, Hey, these guys are, they’re doing research.
They want to grow. So we’ll say something like, you know, that’s great to hear. By the way, we noticed on your website that you have an office located in Minneapolis. We have an awesome team in Minneapolis.
We can provide you with the best, you know, similar service in Minneapolis. Can you put us in touch with the Minneapolis team? I’m like nine out of 10 times. They’re like, yeah, sure.
Here’s the contact that Minneapolis like, why wouldn’t they do that? If they’re like, Hey, Minneapolis person, this is a great service we use. You know, I don’t know you so much, but we work for the same company. Here you go.
And yeah, it ends up working out. And then another angle is we try to come in as like revenue savers. So expense like, like cutting expenses. So we’ll say if you give us multiple locations, we’ll give you a discount across the board.
And now you have a company that’s.
You know a lot for all their locations get a huge bundle with us and get a discount. Yeah, okay That makes a lot of sense. So there is an incentive there, but it still works out way better for you Yeah, yeah, that makes that makes perfect sense. I have a mentor who has has a thing.
He calls the the the law of shitty service, so basically he says that everyone is so accustomed to Being treated like garbage as a customer, you know So you call the bank you’re gonna sit on hold for ages and then you get through to a call center where someone doesn’t speak English very well, and it’s just and then they’re not gonna help you and it’s just this really frustrating experience and we’re so Accustomed as consumers to having a really terrible experience when you actually because it all starts with a good service, right?
you actually have to do to deliver and do a good job in the first place before any of this happens, but but if you legitimately do a good job and people are actually surprised and impressed because they’re expecting things to be just bog-average and Then I suppose if you look at all these other locations that they’re probably getting bog-average service So when you’ve got someone that does a good job saying hey Can we we’d love to do it for this location or for this location or another location?
It’s very easy to make that recommendation. Yeah, that makes perfect sense. Yeah, I’m a huge fan of Sweaty startups. Have you heard that term?
No, talk me through that. It’s basically startups where you introduce technology Rather it’s through software you build Basically go in and you take an industry where the end person who’s providing the service is sweating it was a I forgot who the guy who coined this term was but like land like, you know landscaping and cleaning is one of them just Just any service has been around forever and you have these these services usually do good work Meaning your grass is gonna be great You know the cleaning will probably be good But the customer service is not there because you can survive without actually having good customer service But you could be like, okay, this guy wasn’t so good or the scheduling was weird, but the grass was cut Therefore I’m gonna use them again.
So now you introduce
technology and customer service into an industry like that. And to your point, now they’re like, whoa, this feels very, very different. So we get that a lot where we’re even like setting the log into the platform and we’re awarding customer. They’re like, there’s a platform here.
Like, what’s the platform for? And we’re like, yeah, we’re trying to, you know, make your life easy. Here’s a platform. You could chat with us.
You could see everything that’s going on. And that’s already like light years ahead of our competitors. So they’re already like, whoa, this feels really, really cool. So I love businesses that are just so boring and sweaty, painting houses or anything.
Now you just throw in some sort of platform, throw in some easy way to book the service, and the whole experience just feels great. And you throw in a good customer service and it’s like, it’s so much better than the competition. You really stand out. It’s really easy to stand out.
Is there anything specific that you do in terms of customer service to stand out? Yeah, I think the main difference is we just, we get like obsessed with customer service, meaning like we give you your own rep. This rep is just dedicated to you. Most of the people, most of our competitors are not even just in our industry, but just a lot of service, small service companies, it was, you know, the actual person providing the service, maybe there’s some level of management, but the main focus is on the actual experience, actual service, how good your grass looks, how clean your office is, and they just forget about how important customer service is.
So we come in and we say, Hey, here’s a person who’s not the one cleaning your office, they’re dedicated just to your office. We, you know, we always say they’re an extension of your office. They’re, this is like your, your in-house, out-of-house person. And I think they really like that.
There’s one point of contact, they know your office, they know all the ins and outs. If we have to switch people, you don’t have to worry because we know that Susie likes her pencil moved over here on the right side. And I think just, just making sure that you have a person dedicated to that specific customer is a huge deal.
My wife and I complain on our landscaper every single week. We just, the guy was like, comes whenever he wants.
doesn’t show up when he’s supposed to, you know, just texts us randomly, he doesn’t bill me, like the whole experience of like customer service-wise is so difficult. But the actual service is done, a grass is cut. But now I know eventually what’s going to happen is I’m just going to look for someone new.
And when I do, I’m going to look for that company who’s going to like really not just take care of my grass, but just make it easy for me, get on the same schedule, like have someone who’s actually dedicated to providing the customer service experience. I think that’s key.
Instead of you having to chase them the whole time, just make it easy. Yeah. Yeah. And that’s what we hear from our customers as well.
Tell me, tell me a little bit more about marketing. Are there any specific marketing tactics that you’ve used to grow? Hey, it’s Ryan here. I’m glad you’re enjoying the video.
Listen, if you want to meet me or some of the people that I interview, you should really join the Startup Source SaaS Founder Community. It’s a private Slack group for SaaS founders based outside of Silicon Valley who are past the idea stage and want to focus on growth.
About 30% of our members are doing over a million dollars a year in revenue. So it’s a pretty high caliber group. You’ll get access to regular mastermind calls and workshops. And every week we share exclusive marketing tactics and resources that you can use to grow your business faster.
So if you want to give yourself an unfair advantage and learn from other SaaS founders who are one or two steps ahead of you, head over to startupsource.com and sign up. I think there’s a link in the description down below as well. Anyway, I’ll see you in there.
Yeah. So marketing is an interesting subject. Although you could say this for all different fields of a business, finance, sales, operations, I happen to look at businesses now, especially people telling me about their business or look at other businesses. The first thing I question is, what are you doing for marketing?
Because I think it’s the hardest thing. Again, you could say this about everything else, but I’ve seen companies, even our own company, great operations, great product, great person selling the product, great pricing, everything. But if you can’t get in front of your customer…
You just, you have no more business anymore, you know what I mean? And yeah, marketing, I learned the hard ways is it’s such a, such a vital part to a business. The worst thing is when you just are sitting, sitting around just idly and just no one’s calling you.
No one’s reaching out. Um, we’ve, we’ve tried everything inbound, outbound. We’re still learning. We’re still, we’re four years in business, so we still have a very long go long way to go in marketing.
What we’re doing basically, and what I think, what I, what I found works well is just to continue to run experiments. Hey, let’s allocate X amount of dollars on whether it’s this inbound or outbound, whether it’s ads, Facebook, whether it’s SEO, let’s just run the experiment, spend the money.
Let’s see what happens in six months. Then ultimately just see if the numbers make sense. I think a lot of people don’t put enough effort into numbers and understanding that like the end of the day, all that matters is the return. Like if you’re able to put, I always tell our people we’re listening to get annoyed at me using this analogy.
Like if you’re able to put money into a machine and eventually the machine spits out the money that you put in and then some, that’s a good channel. If you can’t get it to do that, then that’s not a good channel. I talked to a lot of these like ad companies that we worked with and then we stopped working with them and they’re like, why?
Like what the heck? Let’s get on a meeting and they’ll call in their CEO. I’m like, it’s just numbers. Like these numbers don’t work.
Like they don’t work for our model. We can’t pay this much to acquire a lead or acquire a customer. Therefore, like we just, we have to move on. Sorry, I went a little bit on tangible.
I think the long answer, the short answer to my, to my long answers, I think you really need to understand like marketing is just huge early on for us just figuring out what our customer acquisition costs are, how much does it cost us to get a lead? What channels work?
We’re still figuring it out. But thank God right now we’re getting tons of inbound leads. So most of the day we’re getting for submissions on our websites. Our SEO has kicked up a lot.
So we’ll just get organic people calling us. So we have a steady amount of leads coming in there. We’re working on some outbound cold events.
all that but marketing is so so important it’s just I think it’s like the the pulse of every business. I did I did an interview with Aaron Cassover from Agent Methods I’ll stick a link to it somewhere around here but he made the point that when you’re really early on especially if you bootstrapping if you find a channel that works you need to just keep doing that channel just keep double on it double down on it and he said the mistake is a lot of people try you know they hear about running experiments but there’s a there’s a time and a place for that and they they run too many experiments too many early on and spread themselves too thin but once you’ve maxed out that that first channel and you need to find another one then you switch over into experiment mode and you’ve got to try you know throw a whole lot of mud at the wall until you see something that sticks and then you find a second channel and you double down on that and like do you agree with that approach you yeah hundred percent in the beginning we basically use this tactic called parasite SEO have you heard of that no talk me through that basically what you do is you find someone who ranks for the keyword that you want to rank for and you see if there’s an opportunity for you to just basically be on that site now obviously if it’s a competitor that doesn’t work meaning if my end service is cleaning services and someone is ranked number one and their competitor obviously they’re not gonna there’s no there’s no the conversation ends but if there’s a top five cleaning services ranking number one why wouldn’t I just reach out to them skip the craziness that comes with SEO and try to rank and just say hey what can I be on your site is number one a lot of these people I actually don’t like when we did this early on they were surprised they’re like well like what are you gonna do like no why would you be number one and we’re like we’ll pay you for it and they were like wow okay fine yeah they never like you know they started these blogs or they started these like sites that ranked are different things probably the end goal is to eventually kind of build like a Yelp type model where you can get all these people on there but we just reached out and they were like yeah sure if you pay us you can be number one so it’s basically
finding out who is ranking for the keywords you want to rank for, and then trying to get on their site and getting some of that traffic to go directly to you. So that’s what we did early on before we got into doing SEO ourselves, but yeah, we just exhausted that option.
Meaning we were number one. They were like, can we be number one in a different city, and then a different city, and that was our only marketing for like two years. And then finally, every city that they ranked for, we were number one. So we’re like, we can’t give you more money, right?
Like whatever happens now, it just kind of works. So that’s when we had to look for more marketing channels. But yeah, I agree with that, especially Bootstrap. We’re a Bootstrap company, and early on, it’s like every dollar is like crazy, you know what I mean?
We would watch our first ad campaign. We would just watch, someone clicked on your thing, you know, it’s $30. I’m like, no, give me my $30 back. They didn’t convert to a lead, and yeah, for sure, yeah.
I think that’s the thing, because SEO for a lot of businesses is sort of the magic channel, because it’s the lowest cost acquisition that they’re getting, and it’s consistent, and it’s reliable, and it’s scalable. But the thing is, it just takes so long to kick in, you know, and it’s- It’s very, very hard.
It’s very, yeah, it’s difficult. We’ve probably, we’ve spent insane amount of money on SEO to get to where we’re at today. And yeah, obviously, if we were just starting out, we wouldn’t have that kind of money. We would, you know, we had zero dollars, like, and then we put like five right into our business.
Like if you blow that on SEO, nothing’s going to happen, and you know what I mean? Yeah, so you’re saying, so even though SEO is a really big driver, a big marketing channel for you right now, when you first started out, what you’re focusing on was that parasite SEO, and reaching out to people that were already ranking for that, and asking them to make you number one in return for just paying them some money.
Like that was the- That, and then working on SEO ourselves, meaning not just going to an agency or that, like let’s write blog posts, let’s see if we can get backlinks all on our own, meaning in-house, because it’s just, the best marketing is like free marketing, you know what I mean?
So like we were trying to learn everything we could.
Before we went to an agency and said, here’s, you know, a buttload of money trying to get us to, to rate our keywords. Why, why, why did you decide to do it in-house rather than going straight to an agency? Like, did you know how to do SEO yourselves originally?
Yeah, we had someone on our team who was like learning and they were like, can we experiment all the, you know, our SEO knowledge with just with the company and it actually was working at the time. It was, Queenie was like super, super, everyone’s go back to the office.
So every reporters wanted to know, you know, information about cleaning. They wanted to know how do you clean the office? So we’ve kind of did a lot of things in-house where we created a guide that this is how you should clean your office when returning back to work under the COVID-19 pandemic.
So yeah, we were just learning and it was getting us good results. We were ranking eventually that, you know, kind of settled and then we decided let’s go to these agencies. Let’s work with, you know, a lot of that. And that comes with, that’s, that’s a whole different world.
Cause are you going to work with an SEO dude? Are you going to work with a firm? Is the firm a good firm? Is it, is it, you know, it’s just, what kind of results are you going to see?
It’s, SEO is a crazy, crazy, crazy world, but if you get it right, if you figure it out, I mean, you can, you can build the whole business just on SEO, right? And, and when, when you’re doing it yourself, so you, you mentioned, um, at the time there was a lot of, uh, a lot of interest about, you know, you said from journalists, like, did you do Harrow or something like that with it?
Were there any other specific? Yeah. Harrow’s already started. I don’t know how much there’s rumors.
People argue, people will probably say this is so not true. Some people say it’s very true. I think everything changes. The relevance of backlinks is changing.
I don’t know which direction it’s going. I don’t know what it was compared to how it was back then. Back then we definitely saw huge SEO boosts just from getting backlinks. Again, some people today say backlinks are irrelevant.
They have to be from the right ones and all that. But back then it was definitely working because our whole strategy was just backlinks. Um, you know, we, we had other like tiny.
strategies that we were experimenting with, but our biggest one was backlinks. So we used Harrow and we probably got hundreds and hundreds of great CNN, USA Today, Yahoo, just like huge domains, domain rating 90 plus, all the big news outlets, they were all backlinking to our site. And for sure it was working because then we would start ranking for the keywords that we want to rank for.
I don’t know if that’s the best strategy today because SEO seems to change every day. But yeah, that was basically what we did in-house for several years and it works, it was awesome. So you mentioned Parasite SEO, you mentioned Harrow, are there any other specific link building or SEO tactics in general that have been successful for you?
We did a statistics. So we were like, well, let’s, yeah, it’s basically, I don’t know if you’ve heard of this, a lot of people go and build pages, do the research on their own. So you’re not actually going out and copying someone else. You do research and it’s a little challenging to have someone do it in-house, but you basically do research and try to get statistics on things that are relevant to your industry.
You create a page for that. We actually still have one up, I think right now. And it’s basically, it doesn’t have to be exactly your niche, but somewhat like relevant. Like we have like recycling facts, you know what I mean?
We don’t do recycling, but it’s kind of clean. And so now you have all these other sites that are journalists, whoever out there is like, let’s go look up some fun facts about recycling. Now they’re quoting you and now they’re back linking to your site and that just feeds the whole Google algorithm.
So I think statistics are good, but I think they have to be around your industry. We tried this with like totally random stuff, like we created a page during COVID, like top 100 Pfizer facts, because Pfizer was like trending at the time. And Google was like, no, you’re not going to rank, like no one’s like, you’re not good.
Like you have nothing to do with Pfizer.
once we dialed back a little bit and started actually building statistics that are relevant to our industry, that was cool. And then it’s easy to say, hey, these guys, I’m quoting them on a statistic that’s within their industry. It makes you look like the leader in the industry, versus if it’s just random stuff, which again, we tried, it didn’t work.
They’re like, why is a cleaning company talking about FDA approvals and all that? But yeah, I think a lot of companies, and you see this in software a lot, where companies will try to say top 10, whatever software niche they’re in, and then they’ll throw themselves in there. I think that’s cool.
But you see, this is kind of outdated, right? You see that a lot. I think it’s better to talk about the exact industry that you’re in. And then if I’m a journalist, or if I’m writing about that, I’m going to link to you.
And then now it looks like you’re a thought leader, basically. So yeah, that’s what we did. And we still have those. We still get tons.
Once or twice a week, I get a notification saying, big publication link to our statistics page. Just playing devil’s advocate for a moment here, because a lot of people would say that cleaning is a fairly commoditized business. And I see this happening in the SaaS world, in a lot of other spaces as well, where everyone’s basically got the same product with the same features at the same price point, selling it in the same ways.
What do you do to stand out against competitors? I think it’s a challenging question, if you’re just software. For us, it’s easy, because I say we just have the software aspect that like 99% of our competitors don’t. I mean, most of our competitors are just saying, you know what I mean?
But I think you’re right. I think it’s a really good question. Yeah, it’s very challenging. Whenever we look for software, it’s like, well, how is this different?
How is this different than… We have Notion and Asana and all these project management tools. And I couldn’t imagine being in those companies really… You have to really, really stick out.
Again, in our industry, it’s a little bit easier, because there’s not a lot of… That’s why I was saying, take it way back.
Like sweaty startup stuff. I like that because no one’s throwing any software into there. So now you throw in a little bit of tech and it’s like, wow, these guys are, you know, you’re still plowing snow, but now there’s a platform and there’s some software to it, so it feels different.
It looks different, but yeah, you’re right. It’s, it’s a, it’s a challenging question for, for a lot of these tools that are just software. They’re getting very, I don’t know, saturated is the right word, but there’s just so, so much stuff out there, you know, that you could use.
Um, yeah, it’s hard. It’s hard to stick out today. Cause I think there’s like, there’s a few, few aspects to that. And so one of them is like a strategic thing about, you know, how you, you know, showcasing the technology side of things or, Hey, we’ve got this, this platform, and I know you touched on customer service, which can be a big differentiator, but you don’t always see it until you’re already a customer.
Um, and you mentioned the marketing, you mentioned all that kind of stuff. Is there any other way of standing out? Like, do you, do you sell differently? Do you approach operations differently?
Yeah. Yeah. It’s hard. I mean, we, we try to say like we’re a cleaning company that’s ran like a tech company.
That’s kind of our in-house thing. Meaning like the way that we do, the way you communicate with us, just even the way you do simple things like walkthrough. So if you’re a competitor of ours, what you’re going to do is you’re going to hear from a client, from a lead who says, can you come in, please walk my office and, uh, give me a quote.
Now for us, we want to modernize that. We want to make that easy. We don’t want to go in, especially during COVID people don’t want to shake hands. So we, you know, we quickly created this app.
You can just download our app, record your space, boom. And that’s it. That’s all we need to do. So I think, yeah, to, to answer like customer service, I think for us is like a big deal, right?
People feel like, whoa, this is really cool. This feels like a good experience. It’s always challenging because I’ve heard the saying, like, if you have a product that’s 10 times better than the competition, you can just eat the whole market up because this is 10 times cooler, right? Like if tomorrow a robot comes out and he can clean offices, that’s a hundred times cooler than what we’re doing.
Thank you.
just steal the whole market and like everyone will just lose our business and everyone will say, wow, there’s robots. Could you build businesses? Right. But we’re not 10 times better and we have to be sure that we mark, like, you know, we’re, we’re like, we’re two times, but that’s what we say, like, we don’t have some crazy product that no one’s going to like just actively switch to us.
No one’s like calling and saying, you have to use this service. You have no other choice. They’re 10 times better than what you’re using. So it’s like, but we’re a little better.
It feels better. There’s this tech to it. There’s good customer support. So we’d like to say we’re like two times better.
That comes with its own challenges because are you going to leave your existing services just because something’s two times better? No. Um, so you have to like, you know, to go back, you really have to stand out in these ways. It’s like at the end of the day, if our customer is showing up to their Manhattan office in the morning and everything’s clean and they’re happy.
So it’s like, how do we present that? But I think just little things, little things that you wouldn’t even like they go, let make a difference. And it all is under customer support, leaving a little note or like sending them a little bottle of wine. When we close the account, like just little things like that, that’s all leads up to good customer service.
And I think, yeah, I just think across the board, not enough people are putting enough into customer service and that’s how you can stand out when you don’t have a product that’s 10 times cooler. I had, I had a mentor once used to say that everyone’s looking for a silver bullet, there aren’t any silver bullets.
There’s just a shitload of lead ones. So, you know, any, any one of those individual things is probably not going to move the needle on its own. But when you add them all up, that’s how you get to be. Exactly.
Right, right, right. Yeah. Yeah. So we can’t like, like leaving a, leaving a note saying happy Friday, like that didn’t, that’s not a game changer, but like these little tiny things eventually just build to a better user experience.
And I think that’s where we can, you know, our customers are more sticky. They last with us longer with our competitors and it just feels good. And we know, cause we’ve asked them, you know, after, and they’re like, yeah, you guys, it just, it’s better to use you.
They don’t have this wall. They’re not like rating fans. Not yet. Um, but they’re like, yeah, it’s just.
The whole experience is much better than customer services, and that’s enough for them to wanna stick with us. If you had your time over again, what would you do differently? Oof, a serious question. Probably early on, I would, I think I would hire differently and not go into, yeah, I think what we did early on is we decided to open this new unit within our business, meaning our core business, the commercial thing was doing well.
We got excited about something else. We’re like, let’s, it’s kind of like our business. Let’s just, it’s a spinoff. Let’s do it.
And we got people, we hired people. And I think we just got distracted. And I think if I could go back. What was it?
Yeah, it was basically our same service, but it was for homeowners, which is actually what we do today. Fine. It’s a small part of our business, but we hired a lot of people. I think hiring a lot of people, that’s a huge, you know, I think when everyone’s working really, really hard, everyone has a lot of work or they’re overworking, that’s the kind of red flags.
And you want to quickly be sure that people aren’t getting burnt out. But I think even scarier than that is having people doing like not a lot. And they’re like, what do you want us to do? And you’re just, they’re just sitting around, you know what I mean, with not enough work to do.
And they’re great people. It’s not their fault. You, you, you know, you probably overhired. I think if I could go back, I would hire a little slower.
Do you have any rules or frameworks about when it’s time to hire someone? Like if you’re worried about that overhiring temptation? Yeah, I think it’s challenging to find out like when do we hire someone and for what role? I recently read a really good book by Dan Martell, Buy Back Your Time.
And he says you shouldn’t actually hire people in these fancy roles. Like we need a strategic partnership, business development, BDR, SDR. He’s actually like just hire for your time. Meaning like once you’re busy.
like fully once you’re getting close to like you know 100% what is it that you’re doing with your time that someone else could come in and do and just hire a person to have them help you with that instead of bill and that that’s to go back to your other question that’s kind of what I would have done early on instead I was very into like I need a director blah blah blah I need a finance director to building like it just doesn’t make sense yeah so I think just following that rule like when you’re doing a lot of things or someone else on your team is that’s the point where like when you’re getting close to under where you could just like you know go hire someone specifically to buy back your time right to like to get some of that time back and I think people just get too obsessed with hiring for super roles and building these insane accountability charts I think they’re great but at the end of the day like we put people in roles that were like we don’t even need this role just go somewhere like let’s do something else and then it’s like well what are they you know what I mean like why are we hiring for this role you’re like you think you need to have this role at a business but every business is so different unique what you really do is need to buy back your time so you can focus on you know growing your business and what it takes to move your business forward not the director role and all this other stuff one one thing I’ve found personally is that sometimes on your existing team people will step up if you give them an opportunity to so I’ll give you an example I am I was looking a while back at you know do we need to hire a video editor do we need to hire a designer or something but I’ve got someone on the team Sonny and I said hey like do you know anything about designing and she said something to me that I love it’s like well I mean I know a little bit but I could probably figure it out and so between watching a few YouTube videos and you know getting getting a canvas subscription you know that it’s not gonna be the same as someone who studied design and has been doing it for 20 years but it’s good enough yeah yeah sure I think I think people are scared to have that conversation like props to you for doing that I think people in companies that are so like labeled like this is your label
This is your role, this is your responsibility, you follow this SOP. I think it feels weird to ask them to do something that’s very out of that role. But like, at the end of the day, who cares? I’ve tested it a little bit, people have been like, for sure I’ll help you with that, like, I have the time.
Like, you know what I mean? And then you discover people’s skill sets, you’re like, whoa. Like, it’s funny you mentioned Canva. We had a girl who was like a director of a whole unit, and it’s like, you know, you wouldn’t think she would be doing stuff in Canva.
But like, we desperately needed someone, so I asked her again. I felt kind of weird asking this, like, you know, she runs this whole unit within our organization. Turns out she’s like amazing at Canva, like, so good. And I’m like, why would we, like, can you just make a lot of this stuff instead of us, like, graphic designers?
So very similar to what you’re saying. Yeah, I think people are scared to have that conversation. They’re so like, oh, my employee’s not going to like this, this isn’t their role, this isn’t their responsibility. But at the end of the day, it’s like, if this is going to move our company forward, then whoever can do this best, let’s just do it.
And I think people are happy to know, like, I’m doing something that’s contributing to the greater good of the company. Look, if it was me designing stuff, okay, it would be a problem. I’d need someone else to do it. I’m not gifted in that regard.
But for me, the big takeaway from that was like, I think that’s how you know you’ve made a good hire as a startup founder. If someone’s response to that is, no, that’s not my job. Okay, probably more of a corporate type, probably not a good fit for a startup.
But if someone says, I’ve never done it before, but I’ll give it a go. That person that tends to be like that, that shows the attitude they have. And that’s something that I tend to optimize for a lot when I’m hiring people. But coming back to you a little bit, what’s, when it comes to entrepreneurship, just in general, what’s something that people maybe aren’t talking about enough, but should be?
I think just the challenges of disrupting the company. I think that, Duncan, it doesn’t get enough attention. I think a lot of people see this kind of glitzy, raising capital, VC.
Silicon Valley BS stuff out there and they just absorb it they eat it all up and they’re like they get way tuned to their heads and then once they made the decision that they’re not gonna raise money you know it’s very very very challenging to have a bootstrap company you have to know just so many things and cash flow cash flow management you know lines of credit just all this crazy stuff it comes with a lot a lot of risk you have and then once you start hiring people right then you’re like wow no I have people who rely on me so I think just to kind of zoom out I think the mental health aspect isn’t really talked enough about like I think it’s very it could be very challenging I think a lot of startup owners never I bring this up to some people they’re like oh yeah I’m also like I either am or I was like suffering like it was hard it was great times it was awesome it’s fun or still is but it’s so freaking hard and especially people that came from corporate world like I’ve never worked for in that environment they’re like this is a whole different monster like you know making payroll and hoping that you get a customer and then churning and then are we turning more than we’re at like this stuff will keep you up at night and I think just the general bootstrapping company is very very difficult and yeah it’s a lot comes with a lot of responsibility and I think you got a you got to be sure you’re in the right headspace for it is there is there anything that you do in particular to manage because I like entrepreneurs just have like a higher baseline level of stress compared to everyone else we all do what is there anything that you’ve tried that sort of helps you manage that stress level yeah I’m kind of obsessed with this this field actually like de-stressing right because I feel I always say like I do these weird things they’re like these just random like D I try these experiments it’s a lot of marketing I’m always trying de-stressing experiments yeah my head I’m thinking like if I don’t de-stress I’m gonna
It’s going to lose my mind like completely like this is just not normal. You know what I mean? People around me that even know of like situations that go on to work and stuff. They’re like, what, like, what the hell?
Like, how can you like live like that? I’m like, well, I can only manage this much level of stress because when I’m not working, I’m trying to de-stress a lot of it is the boring stuff that like, you know, you’ll roll your eyes on, but it’s just like going on walks, hanging out with family.
Um, I’ve tried the weird stuff, cold plunge. I cold plunge now that works for you. I don’t know if it’s like anything that just, even if it’s placebo, that’s enough for me, meaning if I feel better after it, that’s, that’s, that’s like the thing. But I’m just constantly experimenting over and over.
I have like new experiments every week of just random stuff that like, I’m trying to break my phone last week. I broke my phone for the whole week. I think just always doing that a lot of these things come and go. Um, like, but some of them stick.
And at the end of the day, I go to bed. I’m like, well, that, that did help me de-stress. Either it was, you know, through walking or any of that stuff, basically. Um, cold plunge, sauna, a lot of it’s physical, but also there’s this whole aspect of, um, just these mini little experiments.
I think it’s, it’s really, really cool to just keep trying, um, to de-stress cause then it’s, uh, you know, it’s how you keep saying. The, the, the one that’s worked really well for me is, um, lifting weights. So, uh, and like, so there’s, there’s a whole lot of, you know, you sleep better cause you’re tired more, all that kind of stuff that goes with it.
But the, the thing that I find is like, I’m, I’m a numbers driven guy. And sometimes you have weeks at work where you’re doing all this work, but it’s just not really moving the needle. You’re not seeing that kind of numerical feedback that says, Hey Ryan, you, you know, you, you’re going in the right direction with this, but at least if you go to the gym and you’re like, I can lift a little bit more than I could.
I could do one more rep. Like that, that numerical feedback for me, I find really motivating. So I guess it, it depends, you know, everyone’s different, but, um, is it a couple, couple of final questions? Um, is there something.
that a mentor has told you that’s really stuck with you? Yeah, for sure. So I actually signed up for this program called MentorCam. You know, there’s tons of these.
You can find them all over the place where they basically put you in touch with startup founders, some bootstrapped, some not. And the idea is they get to kind of be your mentor. You can be with them for 30 minutes. So I went on like a, this is actually one of my de-stressing little things that I did.
I like exhausted it in one month. I basically booked like 30 people. I talked to like 30 people in one month. Most of them already had exited their companies.
Okay. And yeah, it was just different people, just quick 30 minutes. And I always ask them like the same question. Well, at the end of each one, I ask them like a question kind of, you know, like, why are you doing this?
Like, what’s, you know, how does it feel? And then the big question is like, how does it feel to exit your company? That’s my goal. That’s what most founders’ goals are.
You know, you’ve exited this company. Some of them, you know, I think billion plus. And it’s like, what’s, how does it feel? Like what’s, you’re kind of where I want to be.
Like, let’s hear it, right? Like, come on. And what’s funny is they all, the general theme, they all had different answers, but there was one general theme was that the reason they’re actually mentoring and they’re doing this, obviously they don’t need the couple hundred bucks, whatever it is from the, you know, the mentorship program.
They actually miss the, being in like the nitty and gritty of the startup world. Meaning, yes, now they’ve exited, they have this and whatever. But, you know, a lot of them weren’t motivated by that in the first place. And they said the most fun they had, the most fulfillment they felt in their life, in their like work career, was actually during the time of where I’m at, you know, year four, year five and onwards, where you’re like building all this up and you’re building a team, you’re building a product, you’re figuring it out.
You have a new problem every single day and then you’re trying to solve that problem. Like that was the fun. And now that it’s over, they’re kind of like.
Okay, whatever. And I think they miss it so much. You see them either start angel investing, start something else, or they go into this whole mentorship where they’re talking to people like me and they’re having a lot of fun. They’re more into it than I am.
They’re like, oh yeah, what are we going to do about that churn and all that? I’m like, wow, these guys really have a passion for it. So I think just consistently be reminded of that, especially when you’re in the day-to-day, it’s like, hey, this is where it’s at.
Sure, one day, God willing, I’ll sell this and whatever, but it’s not like, I think it’s the journey. I know that’s very cliche, but I was surprised that almost all of them had the same theme of like, this is what I’m doing. This is what I’m doing. The mentors thought it was really fun to build a company and solve problems with a group of great people.
It’s hard, it’s difficult, it’s stressful, but there will come a day when you don’t have this anymore and you’re going to miss it. Yeah, I’m sure. I think it’s important to be reminded of that while you’re in it. Absolutely, absolutely.
Are there any tools or books or resources that you would recommend to other founders? I’m big on this guy on YouTube named Ali Abdaal. I think what happens is in the beginning, you’re just running around and you’re like, let’s just do anything to survive. At least for me, it’s like, how are we going to get this product or service into people’s hands?
I’m just going to wake up and work on this day and night. That’s what I did for the first two years. Then I’m like, all right, I got to get somewhat organized. There has to be some sort of routine.
There has to be some level of, this is what I’m doing at this time of the day. Then I started working on building all these systems. I went way too extreme and then I went way too lax, then I landed somewhere in between. I think the main thing that I learned from Ali Abdaal is just like, you got to have a system that works for you.
You can’t just go on YouTube and be like, I’m going to copy this guy’s system. I did that forever. I’m like, whoa, this guy’s got it. Let me copy his day.
I copied people’s entire calendar. Then a week later, I’m so burnt out. I’m like, dude, I’m not going to do this. Oh, I forgot that guy doesn’t have
if I do, so I can’t actually work at seven o’clock at night. But I think just consistently tweaking and just building up some sort of routine. I saw Ali Abdaal is really good on that. I follow his YouTube channel.
His whole thing is like feel good productivity. You should be productive and you should have a schedule, you should have a routine, but it should feel good. It shouldn’t feel forced. You shouldn’t be like, oh man, I have to follow this crazy system that I built.
So that’s one thing. Dan Martell, I’m a huge fan of his and his new book. I’m trying to absorb a lot of that stuff. Yeah, I think his whole buy back your time thing is huge.
I think it’s very difficult. It’s difficult to also, one thing that no one talks about is like, there’s this idea of like, you should delegate everything. You should find people and they should do all your work. And that’s cool.
I’m all for that stuff. I did that early on. I think I did that earlier than most people do. But then what a lot of people don’t talk about is what happens when you get sucked back into doing things?
It’s not this like, ah, I’ve delegated my work and now I’m like this big, just cause you know how to do it doesn’t mean you’re executing on it. So Dan Martell helps with all that, his book. Cause I find myself also being like, I’m the king of delegation.
I don’t have any work to do today and I have all these great systems and then a new project comes along and then I’m like in operations for six months later. I’m like, how did I get here? So I think just being able to pull yourself out of that and build these new systems and he’s good on that stuff.
Fantastic, awesome. And last question, if anyone is interested in working with you, working for you, using your service, how can they get in touch with you? Yeah, for sure. I mean, they can email me roman at booklingo.com.
I also just love talking business, SaaS, remote workers, schedules, entrepreneurship. I love all that stuff. I think it’s very important just to be in part of a community, like startup SaaS or just in general, to be a part of something where you realize like, hey, you’re not alone, especially as a solo founder.
Cause now I’m by myself.
And sometimes you’re like, whoa, just me and this crazy thing that I built. There’s all these people out there that rely on me and they go to bed at night. And they wake up and their income and everything is dependent on me. And that could be a lot of pressure.
It could feel like a lot. You could feel very alone. And then realizing, going on YouTube, going to these communities and really talking. So I’m a big fan of talking to people and just reminding ourselves that we’re not alone.
And there’s tons and millions of people doing this. I mean, it’s awesome and it’s worth it. Roman, it’s been a pleasure, buddy. Thank you so much for coming on the show.
Yeah, thanks so much for having me. I really appreciate it.