Omer (00:11.840)
Welcome to another episode of the SaaS Podcast.
I'm your host, Omer Khan, and this is the show where I interview proven founders and industry experts who share their stories, strategies and insights to help you build, launch, and grow your SaaS business.
This week's interview is a story about two college friends who wanted to build a great product.
They came up with the idea for a startup in less than five days.
Now, usually when someone tries to come up with a startup idea, they usually get a lot of ideas that maybe sound cool but aren't necessarily a good business idea.
But these guys were driven to use technology to create a truly great product and they were passionate.
And also, they didn't really know that much at the time, so they just kept pushing ahead.
Nine years later, they've built a business that's used by millions of websites.
They've raised over $20 million in funding and are generating mid eight figures in annual revenue.
We talk about how they came up with the idea, what they did to get early traction, and how they've successfully grown the business to where it is today.
I think you'll like this interview.
Today's guest is the co founder and CEO of the blog commenting platform Discuss.
He and his co founder founded the company in 2007 while they were still undergraduates at the University of California, and then shortly after dropped out to work on the business full time.
Not only Discuss was my guest's first business, it was also his first job.
Nine years later, Disqus is used by millions of websites.
It reaches over a billion unique visitors and handles over 50 million comments a day.
The company has raised over $20 million in funding and is based in San Francisco.
So today I'd like to welcome Daniel Hart to the show.
Daniel, welcome.
Daniel Ha (02:08.780)
Hey there.
Thank you.
Omer (02:10.060)
Now I'd like to get started by figuring out what drives my guests.
So is there a favorite quote that really inspires you?
And if not, then what gets you out of bed every morning to do what you do?
Daniel Ha (02:23.470)
I don't have a favorite quote actually.
And when you just asked that right now, I felt like I was very close to picking a few.
But because I couldn't actually remember the full quote, I thought I wouldn't embarrass myself.
But I think it's changed over the years.
We've been around for some time and, you know, we've had different challenges or different things that I find personally challenging, and I think that's sort of a good thing.
I think challenges get you out of bed.
They give you a task to go Check off and finish.
And sometimes those tasks are not going to be completed in a day, and they're very large and very much encompassing a full year or so.
So I think about what drives me that week is really how I think about it.
There's really a weak cadence to the way that I approach work.
And this week, for example, we're doing a lot around building the team, a certain part of it on the product team.
And I've been thinking a lot about how to find the right folks and if our way of recruitment and team building and talk about our culture is the right way.
So that's very different from last week where I was thinking a lot about working on a partnership that we're trying to close up.
Omer (03:36.000)
So that's interesting.
Is that how every week is for you?
Do you at the start of the week or the weekend say, this is my number one thing that I'm going to focus 80% or the bulk of my time on?
Is that how you kind of think about it?
Daniel Ha (03:50.880)
Yeah, that's about right.
It took me a little bit to settle into that approach, but what I do now is I kick off the week, really Sundays, thinking about what makes the week a positive win or not.
A great week for me.
If I finished up, if it was Friday evening, feels Saturday morning, and the week was over, and I thought about what happened, what would make it a success versus not.
And I try to share that in a couple different ways.
We have a newsletter that goes out to the team every week, and I have a little letter in the beginnings, and I just talk about what's the top couple things in my head that week and what.
What really drives me personally.
Not just what's important for the company, but what's really getting me going and what I have to focus on as an individual.
So I try to take that and share that out so people know what's occupying my.
My head.
Omer (04:43.980)
Okay, cool.
So before we get started, I want to kind of talk about where the idea for the business came from.
But before we do that, can you just tell the listeners a little bit more about.
About Disqus?
I kind of gave a brief overview of the business, but it'd be great to hear it in your own words.
Daniel Ha (05:00.510)
Yeah, yeah, yeah, for sure.
So Disqus started out as a software tool for publishers to run their comments.
Pretty simple product, and that simplicity helped it gain a lot of adoption.
And where we are right now, you know what, we built it over the last few years.
We're currently one of the most popular Ways for content publishers.
So bloggers, or even medium sized to larger online publications, they use what we do to essentially what I like to describe as audience development.
So understanding who your visitors are, how to get them to participate, how do you make them more loyal and how do you get them to come back?
We are very much entrenched into the media side of publishing.
So we think about everything from creating content to engaging users to delivering advertising.
So for publishers, we think of it as a very simple and elegant way for those content creators to be successful.
And that comes down to how do you really understand your audience.
Omer (06:08.070)
Okay, so let's go back to 2007, 2006 when, you know, when, when was the time that you sort of came up with the idea?
Just tell me about like where did this idea come from?
Daniel Ha (06:23.230)
Yeah, yeah, it's been some time.
This idea originally started in, in probably a, a, a very different form, but it's evolved a lot since the very first conversation we've had.
Me and Jason.
Jason and I met when we were 13 years old.
We had an algebra class together.
We were both the two computer nerds in the class and spent a lot of time kind of building stuff together.
So fast forward a little bit.
We kept in touch, weren't super, super close friends or anything of the sort, but we kept in touch because we had a very similar interest and kind of traded thoughts with each other.
We ended up studying the same thing at our university.
And around the end of 2006 mark, you know, we kind of got to the point where we decided that we wanted to work on something together and treat it very seriously.
So we came up with maybe four or five different ideas over the course of four or five days and we worked on all of them.
Jason is a much, he's a smarter person than I am, I'll describe him as that.
And I'm really into product design.
So I think about a lot of things from a product and a user perspective.
And for him, he likes to kind of tinker with things and see what is possible and try to make ideas become reality.
So we kind of work together both coding and designing in big and small ways.
And we had four or five ideas.
And one of those ideas eventually became Discuss and Discuss originally was our approach to online community software.
And one of those things that we had in common since we were teenagers was a love for online communities.
And by online communities, I'm describing things like message boards and forums, BBSs back in the day and IRC channels.
We actually wrote some software when we were in high school together, playing around with this sort of thing.
And it was something that we were both very much into.
So we were kind of lamenting about sort of the state of that world of software and how everything else was very exciting.
And at the time, the exciting things where people were Talking about Web 2.0, they were talking about all these social networks and social tools cropping up, and you were left with a lot of older software, not very well maintained, not very good for regular consumers around building forums or building online communities.
People thought about communities as an AOL chat rooms or IRC channels that were not very accessible to regular people.
So we wanted to build something that was kind of interesting.
And eventually it evolved.
And eventually, I mean, just over the course of a few weeks, it evolved into the original premise for Discuss, which is that we noticed a lot of the interesting online communities existed because there was some sort of leader who was driving the content, and they were getting people to participate.
And oftentimes these are very much rooted within niche blogs that existed online.
We looked at sites like or networks like LiveJournal or networks like Zynga, networks like Blogger, where you had these blogs that cropped up and they started with one person who wanted to write something.
But the content and the tone of the entire community was shaped by thousands, if not millions of people that ended up contributing because they were very much into that niche topic.
And it was never anything that was super broad, like video games or movies or sports.
It was more specific.
It was strategy games, or it was anime or it was lacrosse.
Right.
It was something that had a very specific community around that.
So we wanted to build for that market.
And we learned as much as we could around publishing and blogs and how to write software for them.
And what we built eventually became Discuss.
Omer (10:42.550)
So it's really interesting what you said about you and Jason spending four or five days to come up with some ideas and trying to kind of work on each one of those.
You know, you often hear about the sort of common wisdom around advice for finding a startup idea is don't look for an idea, look for a problem and scratch your own itch.
And, you know, perhaps, you know, the right idea might take a year or two before you kind of come across it.
So I'm kind of interested how what you guys did differently to be able to come up with an idea in five days.
So if somebody's listening to this now and is in a sort of a similar position where they need to come up with an idea pretty quickly, what was it?
Do you think that you did, because my hunch is that most people like, I mean, if I sat down for four or five days, I probably wouldn't come up with an idea that I could go and work on for the next nine years and raise $20 million.
So what do you.
I know it's a long time back, but what do you think you and Jason did differently?
Daniel Ha (11:58.600)
My take is that there's a couple.
At least for me.
There's two ways to think about it.
You know, I think one approach is thinking about the problem set and thinking about what a number of solutions can be.
And that problem doesn't really change, but your solution can change.
So if you're looking to put out a fire and you're thinking about different ways to carry water or to propel water or different ways to suppress those flames, there's a bunch of different solutions to that problem.
And you can spend a lot of time building a business that specializes off that market.
The other approach, and I think maybe this is where discusses closer to, is if you just work on the solution first without the problem, you know, your chances of actually building something large is pretty limited.
And I think that there's a lot of examples of really fun products, or sometimes people dismissively call them toys, different things that get a lot of attention and maybe it doesn't solve a long term problem that eventually they go away.
I think success is sort of a marriage between the two.
There's some really talented people, some people think of as innovators who kind of build a product regardless of the problem.
They build something because it's interesting, it scratches a personal itch.
And because of the obsessiveness of the original team and the original designers around that product, it becomes something larger.
And you see a lot of things that have never existed before can sort of been willed into existence.
And you find a business around it just because of how good it is.
I think the world is really ripe for that because technologies are so freely available that you can do a lot of tinkering, you do a lot of hacking and stitching together of different components and end up with something fairly compelling.
And it's inexpensive for you to get to a point where other people find it compelling as well.
And maybe you'll find a business around that.
Obviously not a blueprint for success, but plenty of big examples of that happening.
You know, the other way is, you know, you, you think about, you obsess over that problem, you come up with those solutions.
For us, it really helped that we were younger and very naive.
We didn't think about it in any sort of structured or framed way.
We just wanted to build stuff because we enjoyed doing that.
We weren't searching for a problem to solve necessarily, because that wasn't the mindset.
The idea was to go create something and to have people care about it as much as we did.
And we knew that if we paired up that type of obsession and that sort of intensity with latching onto a problem that could exist that we didn't really know about, which we kind of stumbled into, there could be something interesting there.
And I think that's where disgust landed.
Omer (14:48.160)
Very cool.
Okay, so you've kind of whittled down these ideas.
You've got one which is kind of takes the shape of the sort of.
The first iteration of discuss.
What did you guys do?
Like, what was the process you guys went through to get to your first user or your first customer?
I guess you're.
For a customer in this sense would be like anybody who kind of starts using the product on their website.
Daniel Ha (15:20.670)
Yeah, yeah, exactly.
Our first.
I actually don't exactly remember who the first user was because we were pretty indiscriminate about how we try to promote it.
But, you know, our market was something that personally I didn't know very well.
When we started out, it was people who ran websites who wrote content and they were looking for tools to.
They thought of that as either increase their capabilities or their productivity or their website engagement.
For us, we thought about it as, hey, this is a cool thing to create communities in a different way.
So we spoke a different language.
We didn't come across as very articulate or very informed about the market, but we built something that we cared about.
And the.
The idea was to find people that may find it interesting too.
The approach is fairly simple.
I made a list of all my favorite websites, ended up with about 130 different items in my document.
And I emailed everyone by telling them a true and personal story.
I told them that, hey, we're building something.
Don't really know if it's interesting yet, but would love it if they checked it out.
And most people ignored it.
But you only need a couple folks to not ignore it for you to get a little bit of traction in terms of are you on the right track or does anyone else care?
Unfortunately for us, we ended up with a handful of folks that ran websites that I certainly cared about.
So it kind of weaved itself into my daily life anyway, and they cared enough about it to tell us what was terrible and what actually kind of worked.
So we built on that.
Omer (17:08.700)
So I'm curious about something you said about not at the time, understanding that market that well and speaking almost a different language to the people that your potential customers.
Is there maybe an example that you can think of back then where that became really evident to you guys?
Daniel Ha (17:31.340)
Yeah, maybe.
One example is I had a meeting, big meeting lined up, kind of stumbled into it.
And this was early on, it was a meeting with the New York Times.
So I was out in New York and I was invited to talk to their editorial and technical teams to describe what we're doing and why I may be interested for what they're doing.
And I did that well, I guess, to kind of paint the picture for you.
I was already probably somewhere like 15 minutes late.
I was coming from somewhere else.
I wasn't doing a good job in navigating New York at the time and didn't realize that if you're going uptown at close to 5pm it's going to take you some time, especially in a cabin.
Omer (18:24.330)
So not a good start.
Daniel Ha (18:25.610)
Not a good start.
So I came in.
I expected to kind of sit down very similar to how I've met with a lot of our users before, which is usually with someone who cares about product and someone who cares about online communities, and someone where I can kind of hover over their shoulders and walk them through it and show what I'm interested in, which is sort of the product side of things.
And to this meeting already late.
And it wasn't one person I was meeting with.
Apparently they brought in other folks.
So I think in total, it was me and 12, 13 other people at the New York Times, and in a very large conference room.
And we sat around the table.
I was at the head of the table.
I already look young, and this is a few years ago, so I looked probably 12 or 13 years old.
And they asked me a few things that I felt that I answered very straightforwardly and explained it well.
But in retrospect, I was answering in a way that did not show any real empathy for their jobs or any real understanding for the business or the market that we're in.
These are folks who care a lot about their brand.
They care a lot about their data.
They care about content.
They care about how they reactivate users that are no longer very much engaged in their content, how they make money from that.
And, you know, I was talking about things like the features and the user experience and pieces like that, which are important, but not if it isn't well translated into a ultimate goal for them.
And I Remember that often as sort of a time where a conch or some sort of translation layer would have been important.
Omer (20:21.480)
So how did you go about kind of getting familiar with the market?
Was that just like one experience and then you kind of look back and thought, okay, you know, I've got some work to do here.
And you just got better over time as you had more of these meetings or did you sort of deliberately go out and, and start to change the way you were kind of approaching this?
Daniel Ha (20:45.700)
Yeah, I remember that story actually because it was the, it was the meeting that I had that, that made me bring in our first business oriented hire, someone who had worked in the industry before.
And for me it was, it was, it was a necessity because I didn't know what I didn't know and I wanted to connect with people who care about the same things I did, who can, who can speak my language but also spoke a second language, a language I didn't know yet and was good at marrying those two things.
So after that I remember immediately going out and thinking about that as my next to do item.
Omer (21:24.910)
So when did you raise your first round of funding for the business?
So you launched in 2007 and then.
Daniel Ha (21:32.940)
Yeah, so we put out our, I guess call it a beta.
We put out a version of the product that someone can use at the end of 2007, decided to really focus on it, build it out, raised our first bit of money in 2008.
And this was 2008 is probably not the most celebrated time for raising money and building businesses.
But we're again naive, kind of helped that and was pretty oblivious about everything else that wasn't, you know, building the product at that time.
We were just kind of hauled away so didn't think about it too much, raised that money sort of in the first quarter, second quarter of the year and just kept going, kept it very, very small for the next little bit as things kind of proved itself out for us and we were obsessing over making sure the product and had a market to begin with before we thought about anything else.
Omer (22:28.550)
So if I, if I recollect it was, I think it was about 500,000.
Right.
Your first Series A round back in 2008.
Daniel Ha (22:37.990)
Yeah, that sounds right.
It was definitely a small round.
It's.
Omer (22:41.750)
So did you, you guys didn't have any experience of raising money for a startup.
Did was again, was that kind of, did you go out and, and get some advice from people or was that.
You mentioned earlier that, you know, you were both sort of naive at the time?
And was, was that actually working as an advantage for you?
Because you guys were like, let's just go and do it, let's do this, let's do that.
Daniel Ha (23:04.560)
And yeah, yeah, maybe.
We were connected with Y Combinator out here around that time and we were able to, I was able to connect with a lot of folks and got some advice and it was an energy that I really tapped into.
There's a lot of enthusiasm.
But I think some of that naivety helped.
Where it never occurred to me that it would not happen.
It was mostly a matter of when and how much money we'd raise and things like that.
And it wasn't, I don't think it was posturing or boastful in any way.
It never registered to me that it would not happen.
And I think a lot of it is just talking to folks and people had this energy about them and, and me, not me not being exposed to enough of that for me to know differently.
So came out of it with a, came into it with a very, very bright eyed attitude, which I think helps because sometimes it gets really tough.
Omer (24:04.020)
Yeah, okay.
So, yeah, so I didn't realize you guys went through Y Combinator.
That was something that I, I missed in the research.
Daniel Ha (24:15.470)
Yeah, it was a really good experience.
Met honestly some folks that are some of my closer friends now and have seen them, seeing them build their companies or other companies and get married, have kids.
There's a lot of good connections that happen through that one experience.
Omer (24:37.070)
All right, so can we talk.
Let's talk a little bit about growth and what you were doing in the early days to start to get some traction and some people using your product.
So you mentioned that you made a list of your favorite websites and then you emailed people and try to get feedback that way.
But beyond that, what other sort of tactics did you use to get the word out about, discuss and get new, new users of the product?
Daniel Ha (25:12.070)
Yeah, we've done a lot of different things, but I'll focus on one area which I think is sort of interesting because I think it's admission of one, how lucky we've been in some ways.
But also some of my personal shortcomings and I've never been super good at the promotional aspect.
But it turns out after we were able to get a first set of customers, the nature of how a product works and really where we have a lot of our leverage is very good word of mouth properties where.
Because the way that websites do work and if you are a big enthusiast about video games, for example, and one of your Favorite websites uses Disqus for that.
It's a tight community.
Maybe you're talking about virtual reality, specifically virtual reality gaming.
And it's a niche.
It's a community where people who are writing content and the people reading it, they converse and they talk to each other.
They may meet up with each other in person.
The nature of how these sites work, we're able to kind of spread somewhat organically just through being present.
And we kind of leaned on that pretty heavily.
And we were underdeveloped in our sales ability.
Underdevelopment developed on our advertising and marketing ability because it was sort of a ongoing feed for us in terms of that growth.
And we were just going to work off of that.
Since then we have, we've had different challenges on growth, a lot of things around how we make money, how do we market ourselves.
And it's one of my personal weaknesses in terms of understanding that world.
Just less experience and maybe even less interested in many ways.
So it's where I've learned to lean on some really talented folks on our team to disagree with my approach sometimes and really think about telling a story that resonates with a customer base that would not naturally come to us in word of mouth ways.
Omer (27:19.150)
Yeah.
Now, talking about challenges, there have been a few challenges that you guys have faced over the last few years.
And I know that you've, you've faced criticism around privacy and there was, I can't remember exactly what there was, but I remember sometime a couple of years back there was some kind of uproar in the blogging community about hey is discussed tracking my visitor information and going to use that as a way to monetize or run ads or stuff like that.
Daniel Ha (28:00.890)
Yeah.
Omer (28:01.930)
So can you talk a little bit about that?
Like what exactly was going on and.
Daniel Ha (28:07.930)
Yeah, yeah, for sure.
As you were saying that, I was trying to think of the exact context.
Well, I think I have a good sense of what you're saying, but I'm not sure what the the example was.
In general, we work with content publishers, bloggers, and these are folks who are really, really good for us because of how enthusiastic they are.
Which means that when they like stuff, they're going to share it.
That's why our word of mouth works.
Some of our best ways to acquire users is people find it through other sites that write about it and say, hey, look, I'm trying this new thing.
Try it or I like it a lot.
This is why you should too.
And it works the other way around when we mess up or we don't do something really well.
They're not the type of users, customers to really say, all right, well, fine.
Their whole approach on life is to talk about it and they're going to share and they're going to get people to respond to what they're saying.
So in general, I think everything that we do is very much amplified with that.
And I think it's a great thing and it keeps us in check.
We've sort of built a product where it's very software oriented and we deal with advertising as well.
We deal with a lot of users who go through Discuss.
So there's a bunch of different ways where people think about, well, how does this work against my ownership of data and how I want to run advertising, or what if I don't want to run advertising at all?
And this comes up all the time for us.
And it's a couple things.
It's a matter of them being very passionate.
They care a lot about how that product works.
But I think the other side of it is these publishers, they have different expectations.
When you've been around as a free product and you've been able to grow a certain way, every single step that changes.
When you do new things, when you have new parts of your business that has to be well communicated, we have to talk about that often.
We have to explain ourselves really well.
If not, then we're not doing our jobs.
Omer (30:09.350)
Yeah, because I remember the incident with the delete button and if I recollect properly, the way that it used to work was that if you deleted, you could delete a comment, but once you hit the delete button, it wouldn't actually delete the comment.
If you refresh the page, it would still be there, but it would be anonymized.
So it wouldn't be associated with my account anymore.
The comment would still be there.
Daniel Ha (30:37.960)
That's right.
Omer (30:38.480)
And I kind of looked at the.
There was a help page, which is still up on the Discuss site, talking about that from a few years back.
And some of the comments there, people were like, really, really upset about this.
Right.
And I guess it, you know, it kind of goes to what you said because you're basically taking a place, you're taking real estate off on their site and you are, you are becoming a part of their content and user experience.
So they, I'm sure they become very vocal with, you know, when, when there's something doesn't work the way that they expect it to.
Daniel Ha (31:14.460)
For sure.
Yeah.
And I think another aspect of that is we kind of, we, we kind of proxy between two very different groups of people.
We proxy between content creators who are bloggers and we and content creators who are the commenters.
And they're both very vocal.
They both have sometimes very different aims.
So in your example, when you talk about deletions, our approach was, hey, if you post something on a website that does not use Disqus and you write a comment on a website, you are submitting a letter to the editor and they chose to publish it and now it's their content.
That's just how the world has worked for a long time.
That's just how it is.
However, with Disqus, it works a little bit differently because we give a lot of power to the end user, the commenter themselves, if they choose to take ownership over it, to edit it, delete it.
We have that functionality.
We want to make sure that that functionality exists for all people.
Now, that's where the disagreements happen, because if a user decides to write something really compelling and the publisher publishes it and makes it part of their entire page, the publisher will get fairly upset if the commenter decides to take that away.
So we try to take a angle in which we let the commenter do what they need to go do, which is to remove themselves from that conversation, say they regret what they said, they want to remove themselves.
However, we leave the content because the publisher puts a lot of value on it.
Maybe they have built an entire audience around the content that has been posted.
So of course users can just edit out any sort of information or any sort of details they don't want no longer there.
But it was sort of taking middle ground.
But it kind of speaks to, you know, some things that we think about a lot, which is, who are our customers, who are users, where do we sit in this?
And we have to make a lot of sort of decisions to balance the two.
Omer (33:09.920)
Yeah.
So it's been a nine year journey so far.
If you.
If you had known that it would take you nine years to get to where you are today, do you think you would have still set out to build this business back in 2007?
Daniel Ha (33:30.810)
Yeah, no question.
You know, I think we've.
The reason why we've been doing so long is that it's been a really, really fun experience for me personally.
And I've.
The team we've built has been incredible.
And for what we've done, I actually kind of think about the last few years and I really think about it as different companies because not only have we changed the way the business works and there are generations of employees here.
So there are different people, there are a lot of different changes that still make it extremely interesting for me as we continue to be building this up.
And my dream since we started, or anything we could have done on day one is to build something that people use and becomes part of Internet lore.
And I grew up spending way too much of my time using different Internet services.
And these nouns, these names, these domains, they're rooted in my mind the way that old TV shows and old video games are forever with you.
And I want to make sure that what we do makes an impact on, you know, continuous generations of people who spend a lot of time building stuff on the Internet.
Omer (34:46.659)
Yeah, I think I read somewhere that, you know, if this, if Disqu was to shut down, the Internet would just lose like hundreds of.
I don't even know what the number is, how many comments that would just disappear.
It's kind of pretty staggering the impact that you guys have now had across so many websites.
Daniel Ha (35:08.030)
For sure.
Yeah.
It's not just some of.
It's the content.
Some people would argue that, hey, comments are.
They can be.
They can be garbage anyway.
And it's true.
A lot of comments are garbage.
Just the way that a lot of your time spent on the Internet is for fun and somewhat fluid.
But there's what we've done through Disqus that I find still captivating is that we've captured a lot of this attention and energy from folks who want to connect and share online.
And sometimes the things they say are great and can be sort of published to a book, and sometimes they're throwaway pieces of content are just there for the moment.
And I think.
I think it's a little bit of both.
Omer (35:48.000)
Totally.
All right, so now your business model is you kind of offer like a premium version of Discuss, Right.
Or there's like two.
Two plans, or is that kind of what the current flavor is?
Daniel Ha (36:00.810)
We actually had that some time ago.
We transitioned.
I mentioned to you, we had a couple sort of generations in our business.
We moved from that model actually a couple years ago now and moved into almost a purely media type model where we work with the size of our network and we represent publishers around advertising.
And this was actually a plan that was in motion for many, many years, knowing that if we were going to be a large network and we wanted to make sure that we were building something that could exist across the smallest of sites and medium size and up to large ones, it had to fit with the way that publishers thought about building their businesses, which a Lot is around advertising and growing traffic.
So all of our products around the monetization side has been around advertising and traffic driving.
Omer (36:55.130)
Got it.
Okay, so if, let's say if I'm, as a publisher, decide to use Discuss, I enable that for commenting on my site and I can choose to.
I have an option there that I want.
I can choose to leave, leave it showing ads, or I can disable it.
Right.
Is that's the kind of the way it works?
Daniel Ha (37:15.210)
It's exactly right, yeah.
Using our platform, you're using, you know, what we call Engage, that's the name of our comment system as part of Discuss.
And then we have a native advertising product called Reveal, which hooks to a number of providers that are very popular with publishers.
And what we do is we connect those with our platform.
So you're able to manage that and configure it and all those things.
And, you know, if you want to turn it off because you're not a business, maybe you're running your personal site or you're writing about design and development.
Whatever it is, you go into your settings, you turn it right off.
Omer (37:53.430)
As a publisher, can I get a share of the revenue?
Is that built into your business model or not?
Daniel Ha (38:01.990)
Yeah.
So the entire premise is that if publishers are using Disqus to grow the size of their audience and to get people to be more connected with their content, then the other part of Discuss is really to help them finally connect the dots with how they make money.
So we want to deliver them advertising.
We share the revenue that we make.
Omer (38:23.880)
Cool.
Okay.
Now, I know you guys don't talk about revenue, but can you give the audience, like a sense of the size of the business as it is today?
Daniel Ha (38:32.600)
Sure.
So we started out doing essentially a software model, software as a service.
And we did that.
We were thinking about it for a little bit.
First couple years of our business, we were really thinking about user growth and thinking about ways to really build out our user acquisition flow and things of that nature.
And then we got into thinking about how we built the business.
How do we think about making money?
We had a bunch of theories along the way, but we started to implement it.
And in the first year we made maybe a couple million dollars.
And it wasn't a full year, but we were on a good trajectory.
We made maybe 2, $2.5 million off a software model, but we spent a lot of time selling it.
We had a sales team.
We were thinking about how do we structure correctly.
And along the same time, we had a competing model which was around Advertising.
So we decided to go do that.
And then this was a few years ago in the first year of our advertising business, moving out of our SaaS model or software as a service model, we made somewhere along the lines of 11 million or 10 or 11 million.
So a big multiple from that.
And we've been.
This is maybe a couple years ago, we've been growing ever since.
So our plans for this year is to double last year, and we think we're on a good trajectory of doing that again, the following.
So one of the things about what we've had is we're fairly under monetized and we're okay with that.
We're running lean in a lot of different ways because we do have a very large footprint on the Internet.
We do have a lot of reach through the users that interact with our product.
But there's a lot of ways to do it wrong.
We can certainly get more aggressive, do it wrong.
And.
But we have to kind of balance that between never really exploring the business capabilities or being a little bit too careful.
So we try to be communicative.
We tell publishers, hey, this is what we're doing, may not work.
Let us know what you think, that sort of thing.
And it's worked for us before.
Sometimes we fail at it and we get the blowback and we learn from that.
Omer (40:46.890)
So would it be safe to say that you guys are doing somewhere between 11 million and $100 million in revenue somewhere in there?
Daniel Ha (40:55.900)
Yeah.
That's a good range.
Omer (40:57.100)
All right, cool.
All right, it's time for our lightning round.
I'm going to ask you a series of questions and just like you to answer them as quickly as you can.
Ready?
Daniel Ha (41:05.980)
You got it?
Omer (41:06.660)
All right.
What's the best piece of business advice that you've ever received?
Daniel Ha (41:12.060)
You know, one of the.
One of the favorite things I've heard from Paul Buchite from Y Combinator.
He.
He gave Meta advice.
He talked about how when you receive advice, you always have to remind yourself that advice is two parts, which is limited life experience and combined with overgeneralization.
And you come to learn that people love giving advice.
I love giving advice.
I think giving advice is very easy and fun because you get to tap into something that you've learned and know about for sure, but tell other people as if you're the expert.
And I think they're all very valuable things.
But the best, I think the hardest part is knowing how you receive advice.
How do you take in all these inputs and process them properly so that you're not just Trying to live life by wire.
Right.
You're processing things appropriately for what you're doing next.
Omer (42:12.690)
Yeah.
And I think it's.
One of the dangers of taking advice is that if you were to listen and to act on everything people told you, you could potentially be running in all different directions like a headless chicken very quickly.
So I think part of it is also trying to figure out how you.
How you interpret that and apply it to your own situation and circumstances and what feels right for you.
Daniel Ha (42:37.630)
Yeah, that's exactly right.
All right.
Omer (42:39.630)
What book would you recommend to our audience and why?
Daniel Ha (42:44.660)
Let me think.
Books.
You know, one of my.
One of the.
One of the first sort of, I guess, business books that I've read when I was pretty young, that I still read is the people recommend this often, but the how to Win Friends and Influence people.
And there's something really fascinating about it just because of how simple the premise is and how digestible the information is.
But because of that information, I think probably a lot of your listeners have at least know the principles or have read it.
But reading it sort of every word at a time is important because it's not just the concepts or the principles.
It's.
It's really convincing yourself that it's important enough for you to remember because it's easy to forget.
And when you interact with people, either working on a team or you're managing folks, or you're trying to build something with customers, people tend to default to something fairly natural about themselves, which is good.
But you always have.
It's hard to remember empathy.
It's hard to remember putting yourself in someone else's shoes.
And I think that book reminds you that with really good stories, good recommendation,
Omer (43:53.060)
what's one attribute or characteristic in your mind of a successful entrepreneur?
Daniel Ha (44:00.830)
So I already said empathy, which I think is important.
I think empathy is up there.
And I can go into that a little bit.
I think tenacity is a regular one.
People talk about sort of never giving up and plowing on.
I think that's great.
I think empathy is my favorite because almost every other attribute it's helpful.
Right.
Do you want to be smart?
Of course.
Do you want to be hard working?
Who says they're not?
All those things are key, but
Omer (44:32.370)
I
Daniel Ha (44:32.650)
think when you're so singularly focused on any one of those things, sometimes you can push people off.
You forget that, you know, being upset or being angry actually demotivates the people around you.
Or you forget that in your goal to being a super large business, you actually lose one or two Customers that make it there.
So that's what I go back to often.
Omer (44:58.800)
What's your favorite personal productivity tool or habit?
Daniel Ha (45:04.000)
I make a lot of lists I like to carry around notebook, which is probably something that I'd be surprised by if I looked at myself when I was younger and looked at a little bit.
I want everything to be digitized and everything to do run through a computer, including talking to people.
But there's something very effective about writing things down by hand because you're very deliberate about it, and it's very easy for you to type a lot of things and write wasteful things.
But if you have to write it down by hand and you don't have good handwriting like me, you're very careful what you write, and by writing it down, you basically cement your head in a way that typing it out does not.
So I do that.
It helps me a lot.
And I often just create lists of things and they don't make sense because they're just streams of consciousness, but they help frame thoughts.
Omer (45:57.560)
Yeah, I like that.
I love to do mind maps.
I don't know if you're familiar with those.
And I found that I've resisted using an app or software to do it because I know a lot of people who do that.
But I find that if I use something like that, I kind of think too much left brain, and it's about, okay, does how do I use this feature and extend this branch and blah, blah, blah, whatever.
Whereas if you just have a pen and a paper, you just.
You get past that and you just kind of just let the ideas flow.
Well, sometimes.
Daniel Ha (46:29.210)
And that's a great point because it's, you know, especially for a lot of people building software, they're always looking for problems where things are a little bit too hard and they're trying to make it easy through software, which is a little bit ironic because sometimes the most effective thing is to make things a little bit more difficult.
And that difficulty actually makes it more effective in some ways.
Yep.
Omer (46:53.930)
All right, what's a business idea or a crazy idea that you'd love to pursue as a business if you had the extra time?
Daniel Ha (47:05.530)
I think when I started off, I was in college, and like a lot of folks around the age, you end up dreaming a lot about products that consumers use.
You think about social networks, you think about ways to meet up with friends or ways to find bars or ways to go dating, and ways to share photos, really cool stuff that kind of permeate the lives of teenagers and early 20s and things like that.
And I still use those things.
I think they're.
They're really fun and interesting.
But, you know, as I get older and as I kind of think more about the business side of things, what I really find interesting is really, really good software that captures what's captivating about those consumer tools, the experiences and the small bits of polish that they have and combine them with needs that people face every single day in their jobs.
Right.
People use software and tools and processes that are mind numbingly dumb and frustrating sometimes just because no one wants to build software for it.
It's boring, it looks stupid.
But once you apply some of the best things about what consumer products do with the necessity that goes with call it enterprise or business or productivity software, I think there's something magical there.
And some of the stuff I use the today is for work.
It's for things that I want to get done.
And it always gives me a lot of joy just seeing when companies incorporate the good practices of consumer software into it.
Omer (48:47.270)
What's an interesting or fun fact about you that most people don't know?
Daniel Ha (48:51.110)
So, two things I liked growing up.
I liked computers and I liked cars.
And if I wasn't doing stuff on the computer, I'd be racing cars.
So that's something I love tinkering with.
I love the technology around them.
I love tinkering with the parts and I like going fast.
Sweet.
Omer (49:12.450)
And finally, what is one of your most important passions outside of your work, apart from cars?
Daniel Ha (49:19.010)
Aside from that, I guess another part is I like.
One of the reasons I've been into sort of software Internet is because I grew up around a lot of technology companies growing up in Silicon Valley.
And I love that the stuff that I was obsessing over was around me.
It almost felt like I was behind the scenes in some ways.
And similarly, I'm into movies.
After when I was younger, watching behind the scenes and watching people create the special effects and thinking about how they frame the scene, how they tell a story that looks very different on screen versus what goes into that preparation, there's something just extremely magical about it.
It's like being able to work with, with Santa Claus and creating that Christmas magic or crafting something that a lot of people will see but not a lot of people know how it works.
Omer (50:11.070)
Very nice.
Daniel, I want to thank you for joining me today.
It's been great to have you on the show and I really enjoyed this conversation.
Before we started recording, we're talking about.
We'd been trying to schedule this for a long time and I'm glad we finally got a chance to do it.
I wish you all the best with discuss.
And, you know, thank you for being so generous with your time.
Daniel Ha (50:37.200)
For sure.
Thank you.
I'm really glad that we got this going.
Omer (50:39.360)
Me too.
Cheers.
