How Justuno Hit $2M ARR with a Zero Marketing Budget

Omer (00:03.440)
What is that?

Erik Christiansen (00:04.960)
These are stairs,

Omer (00:10.640)
Okay?
No, nobody walks on the stairs during this interview.

Erik Christiansen (00:15.440)
Oh, man.

Omer (00:28.640)
Welcome to another episode of the SaaS podc.
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.
On this episode, I talk with Erik Christiansen, the co founder and CEO of Justuno.
Justuno is a SaaS conversion optimization platform which helps businesses to build their email list, drive more sales and reduce shopping cart abandonment.
The company was founded in 2010, has been self funded and is profitable.
Justuno is based in San Francisco and Austin, Texas.
Prior to launching Justuno, Eric worked@sierrasnowboard.com where he managed the growth of sales from Xero at launch to over $24 million in 2010.
Eric and his co founder Travis built a widget to make it easier for e commerce businesses to use coupons on their site.
It was a simple widget that took less than a month to build and they were able to get some e commerce sites to be early adapters.
But it wasn't all smooth sailing from there.
The co founders were actually working on three companies at the same time.
They didn't know which business would work, so they were trying to hedge their bets.
We'll talk about how Eric and Travis where they had their aha moment which led them to finally going all in with Just Uno.
And you'll learn how they've built a profitable SaaS business doing over $2 million a year with a zero marketing budget.
Eric, welcome to the show.

Erik Christiansen (02:06.550)
Oh, great.
Thanks for having me.

Omer (02:08.470)
Let's start with a tough question.
What gets you out of bed to work on your business every day?
Do you have a favorite quote that inspires or motivates you?

Erik Christiansen (02:17.350)
When I saw that question, I thought back to the one I actually put in my high school yearbook.
And I don't know if it's fully politically correct these days, but it's an old sailing one, which is there are no great men, only great challenges ordinary men must face.
And it's kind of like, you know, anyone can achieve whatever they set their minds to.
It's just you just got to work towards it.

Omer (02:41.590)
Do you know who that quote is from?

Erik Christiansen (02:43.830)
No, I don't.
Should I?

Omer (02:45.670)
No, no, I don't think it matters.

Erik Christiansen (02:49.190)
I say ship active 55 is our sea Explorer in high school.

Omer (02:56.080)
All right, so let's start by talking a little bit more about Just Uno.
So I gave the audience a little bit of an overview but in your own words, tell us what does the product do and what problem are you trying to solve for who?

Erik Christiansen (03:09.520)
In simple terms, what we do is we allow online retailers, publishers, B2B businesses really invest in their on site visitors to maximize the opportunity for conversions.
Traditionally in marketing and sales there's so much focus, it's actually percentage has been thrown out that for every $92 spent to drive traffic, $1 is spent to convert that traffic.
With that said, there's been this disconnect of the funnel and finally after five years, we're really seeing the market come around to understand the importance of focusing on the on site visitor and the missed opportunity.
And once we understand the importance of capturing an email address, the importance of reinforcing your off site marketing message on site and the conversion funnel all the way through for cart bandment, etc.
That's really where we're focusing.
And once you do focus in, you see the instant ROI and people we see that, their eyes open.

Omer (04:11.660)
Okay, I want to talk about how you got started and where the idea for justuna came from.
But before that I want to go back to when you had graduated from college.
Now on your LinkedIn profile I read you were a traveler for four years and then you've got a list of like, I don't know, like 50 countries.
So what were you doing in those four years?

Erik Christiansen (04:33.320)
Man, I was enjoying my 20s as everyone, so I encourage everyone.
Like man, in your 20s, just go before you have a mortgage, before you have kids, go, go experience life because it's really where you learn the most.
Well, I was really fortunate in college.
I had the opportunity to study abroad with a program called Semester at Sea, which really was my first influence with travel.
So anyone who's in college and young, I did two internships and my study abroad is where I really did my learning.
And that inspired me to continue through post college to keep traveling.
And I was really fortunate because I also my first trip on Semester at Sea, I applied for student aid, but I didn't receive it and so I didn't think I could go.
So I had, I devised a plan.
I had figured out how much money I needed to make and I ended up starting to do web design as in 98 to pay for the trip.
And then I was coming up short, but I got close and I set up a website that would allow the students to upload photos to a website and I'd have to upload them from each country.
This is like before Facebook, MySpace, Friendster was probably around.
I don't know.
And turns out that Semester at Sea wasn't happy I was using semester@sea.net.
so, long story short, after I did the first trip, I was so impressed and loved the program.
I donated the domain to them with the understanding that I would receive a job on the ship whenever I wanted to go again.
So 2003, I was in Denver and I missed the ocean.
So I called them up and hopped on the ship a few months later, sailed around the world, came back and then painted houses for a little while.
Lived in Tahoe, Hawaii.

Omer (06:28.800)
Wow.

Erik Christiansen (06:29.920)
I was in some freelance work and then my brother for a year, which was really important, actually sold yellow page ads because I was sick of technology.
I want to learn sales.
My brother called me, who lived in Hawaii and landed on a Thursday, said, hey, I'm going to a wedding in Costa Rica, let's drive.
I wanted my work the next day because we just finished the whole book campaign and asked for a month off.
They're like, no, but go ahead.
And we hopped in the car Friday and drove all the way down to Panama.
That was just kind of the Modus through the 20s till we started doing Sierra Snowboard in kind of mid 20s.
A lot happened in my early 20s, which I encourage everyone to do.

Omer (07:09.460)
Were you a founder at Sierra Snowboard?

Erik Christiansen (07:12.580)
Not in the traditional sense.

Omer (07:14.420)
You joined when it was like right at the start, right?

Erik Christiansen (07:17.460)
Yeah.
Actually, when I was on my road trip down in Costa Rica, I got an email from a friend that said, hey, I have a warehouse.
20,000 extra square feet of warehouse.
And I sat at the retail store up front and he said, I need a website.
So went up there the first year and we were using Counterpoint software and did a million in sales with myself skating around the store, the warehouse, picking up inventory and grabbing people here and there.
After that first year, then we did like 3 million and then we did, you know, we just kept double tripling and kept growing the team.
And by the end we were in like 100,000 square foot facility.
Travis, my co founder, Justuna, was building all the back end stuff.
It was all our own proprietary software.
In the end, we did our first million dollar sale and then shipped 3,500 packages in the same day.

Omer (08:11.480)
Wow.
And then that business grew to $24 million plus in sales and in revenue.
And then I think it was sold in 2010.

Erik Christiansen (08:21.550)
Yeah, 2010 was a crazy year.
The business sold and at the same time, it was incredible business.
So fun, learned so much.
And the online experience, actually off site, we do Snowboard, meetups take 100, 200 people and meet up at mountains and snowboard.
And that's when I didn't really talk to you about is during the time when that finished, I had a pretty bad snowboard accident in the train park and ended up breaking my neck and back.

Omer (08:50.500)
Wow.

Erik Christiansen (08:51.380)
In 2010, I kind of had to start all over in a sense of both business and personal.
And in that time, that's when Travis and I founded Justuna.

Omer (09:04.500)
How did you and Travis come up with the idea for Justuna?

Erik Christiansen (09:07.780)
5, 10, 15 years ago, we'll just say 2010.
You could not mention the word coupon to an online retailer.
And an online retailer would be like, someone's on my website.
Why would I give them a coupon?
Why would I do anything to help them check out?
They're on my website.
They're going to check out.
What we recognized because we were really dynamic and focused is that people were searching for coupon codes.
We did it and that's about the time RetailMeNot was able to grow very big.
And what we recognized is people that left Seer Snowboard and Googled see our snowboard coupon codes, when they came back, they had a sales conversion rate of between 8 and 11%, meaning they had purchase intent.
So what we did is we ranked up for those terms.

Omer (09:55.110)
Okay, so you've got that insight.
And so how did you decide that there was a business opportunity there?

Erik Christiansen (10:00.870)
Yeah, so how do we decide there's a business first?
We saw that it worked like there was a need, so we started to do it on our own site.
We saw the increase in conversions as a whole.
At the time we were looking around and I'm always looking to see what the market's doing.
Always studying every different type of website industry.
And it was the big photo printing site, Shutterfly.
They were the only ones that I found that were actually presenting codes on their site.
They had this beautiful design site.
Orange was their color visual and up in the upper right hand corner they had this red 12 point font use code, whatever.
It was a total afterthought.
Hmm.
It made no sense.
You could tell a developer got in there and put it in.
So kind of back to questions like, is there an opportunity?
I saw people were doing it, we were doing it ourselves.
But it was really cumbersome because in order to one as a digital marketer, we would be changing our coupons daily.
And in order to change it, we'd have to go through development and then they'd have to do it.
They'd have to Q&A it, and then they'd have to push it live.
So the process to go through development slowed us down as well.
And most websites, any digital marketer can speak to the CTO that has their website on lockdown and holds them back from being successful.
CTOs, generally the technical team, they want to make sure that whatever's on the site isn't going to slow the site down.
Is it going to harm conversions and everything.
But they're not marketers.
They're not looking at conversions traditionally.
So without going too far off on the answer to the question, what we were doing at Sierra is we were a discounter straight out.
And people knew we had the best prices, which helped us with our marketing, because Google Base at the time, I think that's what they called it, we'd send up our product feeds manually, mind you.
And then what we recognized is that since people were leaving to search for coupon codes, we wanted to be there at the first point of contact.
So the first thing we did is we in our community forums and we were big into SEO, we had a post that was always updated with our current coupon codes.
And that post we ranked up in the search engines above retailmenon.
So anytime anyone Googled see our snowboard, they would then find our forum post, which would then go to our forum post and we'd update it, telling them what the current 100% active coupon codes were, which is another problem, because on all the coupon sites, there's no guarantee those coupons are going to work.
So we knew that was working.
So then the next step was to have David put the banners on our site with the active codes.
But that would be an act of Congress to do, and it took forever.
But we knew that it worked because back then, Google would allow you to track exact keywords we knew.
And I can send you the graphic.
I took a screenshot of it.
We knew that our average conversion rate, I think, was 1.28 across site wide.
And when we saw that these users of the coupon code had the 8 to 11% conversion rate, that was the aha moment.
We knew it worked.
We had the process, but we needed to make it easier.
We spent several months brainstorming, building, and that's when I was in bed, recovering.
And when I was finally able to walk and be out and about, I went to visit my brother in Maui and spent some time finalizing the whole concept and came back and we built it and launched it November of 2010 or December 2010.
And when we launched it it was a pure freemium model.
And it's always fun to use archive.org to go back and look at our first sites.
But back then, when we launched it, we were a little tab on the side and it was simply, here's our current coupons and that's it.
Simple product.

Omer (13:59.840)
So it was just a website which gave you a list of coupons?

Erik Christiansen (14:02.800)
No, it was a widget.
It was a pop up.
It allowed the user to enter in what their current coupons were.
It was a platform that allowed a digital marketer to log in, create a little button on the side of their website that said coupon.
And when someone just like you have live chat or whatever, when someone would click, would show the whatever copy the digital marketer had put into into the pop up.

Omer (14:31.089)
What did you build that with?
Just like some JavaScript.

Erik Christiansen (14:33.970)
Travis just built it.
We used AWS to call to reference it and it was all homebrew, 100% built.
Like, Travis started busting it out.
I couldn't believe it's like.
Because you'd have to get the embed code.
This is 2010.
So given it was only seven years ago, whatever, it still was new technology.
The fact you could just put embed code on your site and it would then read into this dashboard we built in real time.
Because I blew my mind away, I'm like, this is insane.
But when we started to talk to people, they're like, why would I give people coupons?
No way.
I need something more out of this.
And so then we got into the gating.
That's when we realized.
Okay, and social was really big at the time.
So then we built it in that you'd have to Facebook like or tweet in order to get the coupon or capture an email address.

Omer (15:26.960)
Okay, so how long did it take Travis to build that?
Because it sounds like a pretty simple tool.

Erik Christiansen (15:34.880)
I mean, Travis is kind of a madman, so he probably builds three times quicker than your average bear.
But I'd like to say maybe a month before we really had something we could look at.
And keep in mind, we were building two other companies at the same time too.

Omer (15:53.200)
Yeah, of course.
As you do.
Right.
And so what did you do to get the word out about this or you just.
Because I guess it was freemium, so

Erik Christiansen (16:02.060)
it wasn't really definitely the first thing.
We reached out to any contacts we had in the retail business.
I think we got a couple people on board from that.
Then the second thing, I can't remember exact details, but I can tell you what was our first big win, and our first big win was when BigCommerce added us to their app store.
BigCommerce is a e commerce platform.
They were early into the.
Into the game.
They're still one of the leading E commerce platforms out there.
And they were experimenting, but with an app store, meaning their retailers could go to their app store and look for tools that would help them be successful.
And I was working, I'm working with them.
And it was, to this day, it's the fastest app store we've ever gotten into.
It was literally within the same day of building the relationship with them.
We went live almost, and instantly we got like 10 signups in one day and chaps and like, oh my God, I got 10 signups.
And that was our aha moment.
And the second aha moment was when after like two years, we were running different companies and we're trying to like hedge our bets, which one would take us to the promised land.
And we took just, you know, out of freemium, I believe, in 2013, because we were a completely free tool, you know, app.
And I emailed or called, you know, our best performing customers.
I said, hey, we're preparing to come out of beta, I believe I've worded just like this.
I want to know if we've earned your business.
And the response was awesome.
It was like, yes, I love your product.
It's helping us.
I will definitely pay you.

Omer (17:56.420)
How much did you start charging for it?

Erik Christiansen (17:58.740)
I think it was $75 for that customer a month because they were a bigger one.
We've changed our pricing model so many times, but maybe they're paying 19.
It was under 100, I'll tell you that much.

Omer (18:12.740)
Okay.
And then kind of currently, what does somebody, oh, I've got that little slider on your website.
So up to 5,000 visitors, you don't pay anything.
Then it scales up to 19amonth and then all the way to the end.
699amonth.
699amonth.
And then there's a custom beyond that.
Yeah, okay.
That's quite a range.

Erik Christiansen (18:36.720)
Yeah.
And we also have professional services now that starts at an additional 4.99amonth and goes up from there.
That's been phenomenal for not just our customers, but for us because we are able to push the limits of our platform.
We use justuno on our own site as well, but with our customers that we manage their accounts, they're always helping us.
And we're helping them push the limits of what we can do, which makes it even more Fun for us, but the pricing that is.
We've done everything with that, and someone could get a PhD in pricing.
I'll just tell you where we are today.
Today we're at a model that is a response to everything that I hate about all the tools we use, because we pay for, like, 30 different platforms ourselves.
And Salesforce is the number one that I despise.
And because anytime you need to do something like, oh, that's on the next plan, what you want to do, you can't do with this, the plan you're on, we need to upgrade you to the next one.
And with ours, we say, look, if you pay us, you have access to everything.
And we base it solely on their traffic.
And it's a simple model that all of our agency partners can understand.
That's also the big factor of why we do it.
And then the last component is we've had people have been with us from day one, and we've watched them grow their businesses, which is fantastic.
And so we offer the small SMB that's starting today has the exact same access to the exact same features that the biggest retailers in the world are using.
It's a level playing field in terms of tool sets.
It's just a matter of how proactive do you want to be with your website visitors.
And that's why you see that our premium model goes up to 5,000 visitors, which I will say we actually, you know, for other SaaS companies, we actually got rid of our freemium model.
For many years, we shied away from it, and we got rid of our $9 a month plan, because the $9 a month plans, they'll put you out of business.
Everyone thinks that, oh, I'm going to launch this product and I'm only going to charge nine, nine bucks, and I'll get 100,000 people on it.
I'll make so much money.
The truth is, it is extremely hard to make a living off a product that is under $10.
And those customers have the highest touch and the highest churn rate.
So food for thought on that regard.

Omer (21:16.030)
Yeah, I like the simplicity of it that, you know, everybody gets everything.
And so it's a nice, clean freemium model.
And if somebody's under 5,000 monthly visitors, you know, they don't pay anything.
They can get up and running with this.
They can start to see the value of it.
And when they get to beyond 5,000 visitors, it kind of becomes a bit of a no brainer to pay for it, right?

Erik Christiansen (21:40.660)
Yeah, you can kind of factor if you're generating more than 5,000 visitors.
You're probably selling some product, right?
You know, because it's so easy to start a store now with like Shopify.
In 30 minutes you can be up and selling.
It's crazy.
You know, so you have a lot of these mom and pops that are selling and you know, traditionally it's really hard to open a retail store.
It's just, it's so cheap and easy now.
It's crazy.
You never know what's going to be the next big hit.

Omer (22:13.250)
All right, so in terms of revenue, where are you guys right now?

Erik Christiansen (22:17.650)
We always, we set goals and we've set two goals.
Goal number one is to double every year and that we've achieved.
And that's some of the advice, you know, I've received outside of just, you know.
And the second for us, we, you know, setting milestones and realistic milestones that we as a company can hit.
And our first big one was 100,000.
Early on we were, we couldn't believe we broke 100,000.
And then our next milestone, that was $100,000.

Omer (22:49.808)
ARR.

Erik Christiansen (22:51.630)
Yeah, sales.
The next one was 100,000 in a month.
Like we were working that one for a long time.
Which when you hit, that hits our other milestone of the million mark.
So that we hit our million, we really felt like it was a big accomplishment for us.
And so now our next milestone we're working towards is 10 million.
And what I've found is that every year what we're looking at to hit our goals, our focus and our strategies shift a little.
And as I understand numbers and I understand managing the business, understand churn every year is a new learning curve.

Omer (23:34.060)
So right now you guys are doing more than $2 million a year.

Erik Christiansen (23:37.660)
Correct.

Omer (23:38.220)
That's awesome.
So this is the part of the conversation I've really been looking forward to having.
And so let me just lay it out for people who are listening.
So you guys start just uno in 2010.
You're self funded, you had basically a zero marketing budget and you're already generating several million dollars a year in revenue and talking about a goal of $10 million.
How does that happen?

Erik Christiansen (24:10.960)
I mean, when it's all said and done, I'll write a book and try to remember.

Omer (24:19.840)
So let's talk about some of those growth strategies and what you did to get the word out and get more customers.
Yeah, I know content marketing was like a big play for you guys.
Tell me a little bit about that.
What were you doing?

Erik Christiansen (24:34.790)
What I did is I kind of carried a lot, a lot over from what I learned at Sierra Snowboard, where we also didn't have a marketing budget and we had to be super creative and resourceful and stretch every dollar, every dime, whatever the phrase is out.
And at Sierra I learned that it's all about the cost to acquire a customer and where is that customer and how do you get them to come back to make that second purchase as well, because 80% of customers only shop once from retailers.
So part of it is a culture within the company that we respect the dollar and we respect our customers and the process.
And what we've done is we've built a sustainable business which here in San Francisco is extremely rare.
There's so much money being thrown around.
People like to throw money to solve problems, which in a sense doesn't create for a sustainable long term business.
So we looked at a few areas we looked at.
I knew I want to invest in content, which is one reason one of the biggest investments we made early on was in HubSpot into their platform because they themselves believed heavily in content marketing.
So content is number one.
And what content does for you as well is it helps you with SEO.
So SEO is, you know, at Serious Snowboard we ranked top three for whether it be snowboard, buy snowboard, cheap snowboards, Burton snowboards, whatever.
The new model of Burton Snowboard was out.
We bought all the domains, built all these feeder sites.
So SEO to me is what you start on day one and you have to identify and study and figure out what terms you should be going after that you really have to have an intimate understanding of your business to understand what to go after.
So you have SEO, you have content.
Travis and I, when we started get Facebook likes was the best phrase to have and we ranked up to the top three for that.
So that helped us.
That's back when.
And then it was hilarious because you could just go buy Facebook likes as well.
I think it's why you're seeing the resurgence of email marketing.
So right now if you Google email pop ups, we're number one.
I think we're number two as well.
So as we look at it, we didn't have a budget to buy AdWords.
And the truth is AdWords generally is hard to work with.
B2B.
B2C, you can make it work.
B2C is a little more difficult.
The other is the relationships.
Adam from ActiveCampaigns at the Office today here before this podcast, we were catching up.
There were nine people when I knew him four or five years ago there.
They're up to 20 or 30.
That's another great success story with Jason.
It's a self funding company.
They're up to 200 people now.

Omer (27:26.550)
Wow.
Well, I should get them on the show.
I've been using ActiveCampaign for the last couple of years now.
Great product.

Erik Christiansen (27:32.940)
Yeah, Adam's here, so then that's where I get into the relationships.
And it's rare.
Just like it's pretty interesting because Adam's been there for five years plus.
Whatever.
Same with our employees.
We have long term employees here because the cultures recreate.
But so often I know people are their third company now within our industry.
The companies have changed, but the relationships haven't.
And so I personally made a big investment in all our relationships.
And you know, you talk about how do you maintain those.
There's different ways.
But how do we grow?
How do we get to where we are today is we didn't get to where we are by going and spending 10, 15, 20, $30,000 on a booth at the trade shows.
The way we did it is I would fly there by myself.
So like IRC in Chicago, I would fly to Chicago.
I fortunately have a good friend that lives there, so I'd stay at his place.
So it was free to stay there.
I would get an expo pass.
If not for free, you know, you can buy it.
Travis ran a retail store, so I just get it for like 79 bucks there.
I would walk the floor and I would spend my entire time shaking hands and FaceTime with all of our partners, all the app stores, and I focused all my time on getting into every single app store I possibly could.
And that's how we grew our company.

Omer (29:00.860)
How were you figuring out what app stores to get into?
Or you just didn't care as long as you were getting into an app store, everyone.

Erik Christiansen (29:10.060)
So back then I didn't care.
Right.
And that's the learning curves of the shotgun approach.
Well, 2017 in January, we sat down, we go, okay, shotgun approach is killing us.
We don't have the resources to service our.
I don't know what we're at 200 different ESPs, E commerce data, you name them, partners, we can't service them.
And we're doing a disservice to everyone by doing this.
So we actually honed down and I finally understood.
I had my own aha moment of oh, that's why they have tiers of partnerships.
You know, it's like that's why they don't.
They actually plan out podcast or webinars and everything is that we recognize that present Day is that our partners, while we have so many.
It's the 8020 rule which actually for us is actually a 9010 in terms of where our revenue is coming from, where our focus.
And so we broke our partnerships up now into only two tiers.
We have the tier uno or top tier one and everyone else and only our top tier ones.
And we base it off three criteria of engagement.
Are they engaging with us?
Are we doing co branded marketing material, guest blogs, webinars, et cetera?
Are we training their account management team?
And then the second is current customers we have with us.
It's an easy identifier.
And then the third is opportunity for do we want to invest for the.
We see a long term opportunity with them.
But early on, I mean the market was different five years ago too, four years ago in the sense that there was such monopoly in the e commerce space.
Shopify BigCommerce really started to dominate with the SMBs Mid Market.
It's really kind of simplified down a little but you could kind of rate leads from different partners too.
But overall a lead's a lead and we'll take a lead from anywhere, any partner.

Omer (31:07.150)
So SEO, you started pretty early on and you guys were creating a bunch of content.
Who was creating that, who was writing all of these posts and whatever else you were creating in terms of content.

Erik Christiansen (31:21.390)
So originally it was me experimented using some outsourced blog writing but I found that in order to get a decent blog I still had to architect the framework what they're going to talk about.
So in the end we still weren't getting them written.
So it was me early on.
And then did I hire any contractors I may have.
And then I finally in 2014 was fortunate to find Grant Thomas who is a great writer and is now running our marketing department.
He really took the ball and ran with it.

Omer (32:02.990)
And how are you figuring out what to write about?
You talked earlier about okay, I've got, you know there are these e commerce businesses and you're having a hard time trying to persuade them to.
They don't even see the value in having coupons.
And so you've got to kind of one is you've got overcome that and get them to understand what the value is and then you've got to get them to believe in your product and pay for it and then go and integrate it.
So in terms of the content, how were you, how were you positioning that?
What was the kind of the high level strategy to attract these people?

Erik Christiansen (32:43.180)
It might be better current day strategy.
If I remember we could probably look at some of our old blogs, I'll tell you.
I mean, because I had a background in SEO, I knew.
So we were talking about get Facebook likes.
As we talked about and everything, all inbound links were like, get Facebook likes.
That was our entire focus.
So a lot of our content was around our entire SEO strategy.
I don't know if we did.
I think we were trying to do case studies back then to show.
There's nothing like a case study to show value.

Omer (33:18.390)
Okay, so would it be fair to say it wasn't like there was.
You kind of sat down and said, okay, here is our content strategy for the next year, and this is the type of stuff we're going to create.
And whatever.
It was more like organic in terms of what you thought would get people's attention and keywords that you thought would be worthwhile going after.
And then you were just doing what you had been doing at Sierra Snowboard, which was, okay, we've identified these keywords.
Let's just figure out how.
How to optimize for them.

Erik Christiansen (33:48.400)
I think that's pretty safe to say.
That's probably what we're doing.

Omer (33:51.200)
And then the.
The App Store integration as well.
That sounds like that was a big part of your kind of customer acquisition

Erik Christiansen (34:03.120)
plan, which has changed, you know, which evolves because, you know, the markets change.
There's so many apps out there now.
If I were to start a new company today, probably half of what we did won't work, you know, just because the market's evolved and you've got to

Omer (34:19.890)
a point where you have over.
Like, I think I read somewhere on your website that you have over 55,000 websites that.
That use Justuno.

Erik Christiansen (34:28.730)
Yeah.
At one time or another, have.
Have used us.

Omer (34:31.770)
Yeah.
And did most of that come through what you were doing with SEO and these App Store integrations?

Erik Christiansen (34:39.340)
I would say, oh, Mayor, maybe what we'll have you do is come in and analyze those 55,000.

Omer (34:45.420)
Yeah, that sounds really fun.
Okay.

Erik Christiansen (34:52.460)
You know, a bulk are coming from app stores.
Maybe 20% from.
This is just gut, right?
20% made from SEO, you know, 60% from app stores, minimal from paid.

Omer (35:03.900)
Tell me about a strategy that you tried that didn't help you grow or get customers.

Erik Christiansen (35:09.660)
Seems like anytime we try to pay for something, it just never works.

Omer (35:13.180)
That's a good guide.

Erik Christiansen (35:15.660)
Yeah.
We did this one video campaign where we paid, we created some content, and they held the leads that watched the video hostage, in a sense where they claim they're going to be these incredible leads, and we ended up paying like $5,000 for like 100 bucks a lead.
And they materialized to nothing because I had a second company that tried to sell me on it too.
And I said, look, you're claiming these are the greatest leads.
If you stand by that, I will pay you that after they convert.
Because it's one thing to hand off a lead, it's a whole nother thing to convert that lead to a sale.
And we as an operation weren't built to even process those, those leads because we had so many inbound ones from other channels and I didn't have the sales team available to close what we would today consider just a marketing qualified lead, not a sales qualified lead.
Being, you know, sales qualified is ready, is interested in ready versus they just maybe watch something.
And so I would say be wary of anyone that comes to you and says we can deliver you X number of leads that are in your segment and we're going to charge you $100 a lead.
But we have no onus to their ability to convert.
You can negotiate that contract to you pay them once they convert and maybe base it off percentages of that sale.
Then you'll know they're interested in your best interest.
And that's what I pitched back to the second company go, look, I'm not going to pay you up front, but I will pay you XX and X.
And they're like, no, we can't do that because they knew their leads were shit.

Omer (36:58.470)
You also tried affiliate marketing, right?

Erik Christiansen (37:02.390)
The discussion around affiliate for me personally is that like I said, our best partners are ones that have the best interest of their customers and aligned.
When we work with our partners, it's a real partnership in a sense that we're helping train our partner, we're helping that customer be successful just as hard as they are working to make that customer successful.
And that's the entire conversation every time we meet everything, the entire relationship and our best partnerships both ways.
And even when I'm offered, I'm like, I don't want a single dollar from you.
I want to make the customer successful so we can extend the lifetime value of that customer because we'll all make more money if the customer is successful.
If someone opens the conversation with what's your commission program do you use?
To me that's a red flag.
Right.

Omer (37:56.090)
Because they're motivated more by the commission than thinking about value or kind of a long term partnership with you guys.

Erik Christiansen (38:05.330)
Yeah.

Omer (38:06.370)
Okay, so tell me a little bit about why you guys didn't think because you've been in business for seven Years.
And you haven't gone out and tried to get funding.
How were you funding the business in the early days?

Erik Christiansen (38:21.590)
So in a few different areas there, Travis and I didn't take a paycheck for four years.
I was living in San Francisco and didn't take a single paycheck.

Omer (38:30.670)
Wow.

Erik Christiansen (38:31.510)
And that kind of goes into you kind of reference a book that we can look at is in college.
One of the professors he recommended.
I read Millionaire Next Door and I've kind of always lived by it, but it really reinforced a lot of my beliefs.
And I kind of passed that down through the company as well, is that we live at our means, we don't overspend.
And that allowed me to save money while I was doing Sierra Snowboard, I saved up money to be able to invest in myself.
And that when I was trying to figure out what path to go, should I start a company, what should I do?
I talked with some personal family, friends, and one of the best advice I received was Bill Hutchinson said, eric, invest in yourself.
That's going to be the best investment you can make long term.
I was like, okay, that's what I'm going to do.
And so for four years I lived off savings, did my best to live below my means.
I pass up opportunities like maybe join other companies.
Not that I was offered, but I was at Rocket Space, a shared workspace in San Francisco.
One of the very first ones was actually the first tenant there with Duncan and like Uber was 10 people there and I should have just gone work for them.

Omer (39:54.620)
Right, right.

Erik Christiansen (39:55.780)
They were so annoying to be sit next to.
We were so thankful that when they moved out.
Yeah, the past paths, ways through.
But as we started to grow in our first sales, what we did is as soon as we were making like 3,000amonth, we hired our first salesperson and then we're making 6,000.
We were able to pay the initial for the actual very first salesperson.
And then we just kept.
Every time we make more money, we'd reinvest it over those four years.
And then we actually took a very small kind of like angel sale seed from a family friend under 100,000 just to kind of help spur sales.
And then we continue to grow, just double down, invest.
Travis and I started to take this very small salary to at least stop the bleeding.
And then September 2015, my personal account was.
Travis was drained.
Our line of credits were tapped out.
I had 20,000 credit card debt and we were against the ropes.
So that weekend I got married.

Omer (41:06.670)
Oh my God.

Erik Christiansen (41:08.190)
So Saturday I got Married and my company was bankrupt.
I was bankrupt and I had 20,000 in debt and I had to run payroll on Tuesday.
So.

Omer (41:18.990)
Wow.

Erik Christiansen (41:20.110)
Actual savior for us was Lighter Capital based out of your town of Seattle.
You know, you asked did we try to raise money, where did funds come from?
For several months prior to this point, when I knew we were about to bleed out, I began looking into fundraising.
And I have my own feelings about people that try to give you advice that have never started a company but have only have an mba.
I, yeah, I have a feeling in that regard, but I sucked it up and I, I actually, you know, took like 30 meetings or something and you know, to get emails back that say, at the end of the day, I don't see you being a billion dollar company.
It's like, I'm not trying to be a billion dollar company.
You know, they're like, we built.
We've done everything that you're supposed to do with the business.
I have a sound business where like borderline, you know, like we were growing, doubling.
We just needed to get to that next level.
And so people didn't see that 10x at that point.
And so I, and before, you know, I was bleeding out, I was running out of time.
So I.
There was the secondary option B to get me, which was lighter capital.
We ended up signing the documents on the Monday after my wedding.
I ran payroll, received the money on Wednesday and they pulled payroll on Thursday.
Thursday from the bank.
My team got paid on Friday.

Omer (42:42.160)
And that was just like some debt financing.
Yeah.

Erik Christiansen (42:45.320)
So purely there was Lighter Capital sits between VCs and the banks.
The banks have to do a personal guarantee.
VCs take their cut percentage of their company.
Lighter Capital sits in the middle.
They're like one notch above a loan shark.
So there's no personal guarantee, but there's really high interest.
What I can tell you today is that we would not be where we are today even without them.
And so while it was high interest, it worked out great for us.
And also the bank wouldn't loan us because we had no assets.
They don't view your SaaS revenue as an asset.
So it would be hard to get a loan from a bank.
And then the VC's up top because we already had revenue, didn't see us becoming this gigantic thing.
And so we were really in this really weird middle area.
And that's where lighter capital came in.
And if I look back at it today, what I really should have done is gone to sba.
They will actually secure back a loan for businesses.
So I think fast forward, I probably would have tried to look at sba because we had the revenue with the business.
We can support it.
And we've supported.
We've made every loan payment.
That's probably what I would have done, but whatever.

Omer (44:03.240)
But it worked out in the end.

Erik Christiansen (44:05.240)
Worked out in the end.

Omer (44:06.200)
Yeah.
That's awesome.

Erik Christiansen (44:07.640)
We're a debt free company.

Omer (44:09.400)
Yeah, debt free.
Profitable.
And if you continue the growth that you guys have been getting in terms of doubling every year, that $10 million milestone isn't really that far away.
That's awesome, man.
I love that.
I love that.
All right, let's get on with the lightning round.
Gonna ask you seven questions.
Just try to answer them as quickly as.
All right, you ready?

Erik Christiansen (44:33.450)
Let's do it.

Omer (44:34.570)
What's the best piece of business advice that you've ever received?

Erik Christiansen (44:38.010)
Well, invest in yourself.
That one was great.
The other one, more practical is my friend's dad.
He built a successful retail business, one of the first big box.
And he said, at the end of the day, all that matters is what's in your till.
And that's what I try to focus on, is sales and avoid all the noise that comes with being in this industry.

Omer (45:01.430)
Or what book would you recommend to our audience and why?

Erik Christiansen (45:04.950)
Probably two.
The first one I mentioned, Millionaire Next Door, just without.
I already kind of explained it, but if I can throw a second one in, the predictable revenue model ones are pretty interesting.
But I'm going to stick with my Millionaire Next Door.
That's my one book.

Omer (45:20.630)
What's one attribute or characteristic in your mind of a successful entrepreneur?

Erik Christiansen (45:25.900)
Got to be resilient.
Just got to keep going.
Gotta be like, cockroaches doesn't die.
I've seen so many companies come and go, and because we're so scrappy, we just keep clawing.
I'd say that's probably it.

Omer (45:39.820)
What's your favorite personal productivity tool or

Erik Christiansen (45:43.580)
habit to do list?
I still just make my to do list.
I'm staring at one right now on paper.
I use the little notepad on my Mac.

Omer (45:55.590)
There you go.
And it works.

Erik Christiansen (45:57.430)
It works.

Omer (45:58.070)
Yeah.
What's a new or crazy business idea you'd love to pursue if you had the extra time?

Erik Christiansen (46:03.350)
I want to go build wood tables.

Omer (46:06.389)
Build tables?

Erik Christiansen (46:07.990)
Yeah, Wood tables.
Love working with wood.
Whatever.
I can get away from technology.

Omer (46:15.430)
Oh, man.
And what's an interesting or fun fact about you that most people don't know?

Erik Christiansen (46:22.650)
I once lived with 34 mini bikes in the basement of my house in Fort Mason in San Francisco because I had a deal that went wrong.
And I had to live with 34 mini bikes that had a piece.
I'd say that's the one my buddies like to make fun of me.

Omer (46:43.150)
And finally, what's one of your more most important passions outside of your work?

Erik Christiansen (46:47.550)
Surfing is my.
My go to.
If I can do anything, I go surf.
My newest one is fishing, but I'd say surf.

Omer (46:56.110)
And the wooden tables.

Erik Christiansen (46:57.790)
Yeah.

Omer (47:00.350)
Oh, man.
Eric, I'm really glad we got a chance to chat and kind of you shared your story with us.
I got to say, you are like.
I don't know if this is a.
It's meant as a compliment.
You're like an onion, man.
It's like we started this conversation and I knew there was an interesting story there, but the more we talk, it's like these layers keep coming off, and it's like there's all of these new things I discover along the way.
It was like we could have kept talking for, like, another couple of hours.

Erik Christiansen (47:32.170)
I appreciate that.
I love talking about this stuff, and I.
We've been so busy and heads down, I rarely have time to kind of reflect back on what we've done.
And so, no, I totally appreciate it.
Anytime I'm around.

Omer (47:46.690)
That's.
It's been great to have you here.
Now, if people want to find out more about Just Uno, they can go to just uno.com and I'll include a link in the show notes to that.
And if people want to get in touch with you, what's the best way for them to do that?

Erik Christiansen (48:04.070)
Just email me ericustuno.

Omer (48:07.430)
All right, sweet.
Thanks, man.
I know you're on a mission.
You've got to go and do something for your wife.

Erik Christiansen (48:14.390)
My dog just 20 teeth pulled, so.

Omer (48:16.870)
Oh, that sounds.

Erik Christiansen (48:19.350)
My other piece of advice is get dog insurance.

Omer (48:25.830)
All right.
Well, I hope it isn't too bad and your dog's in good shape.
Thanks, man.
It's been a pleasure.
I wish you all the best.
Cheers.

Erik Christiansen (48:32.550)
Thanks so much.
Take care.