Omer (00:10.720)
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.
In this episode I talked to Tyler Tringas, General partner at Earnest Capital which provides early stage funding for Bootstrappers.
So you want to start a SaaS company, but people keep asking you how big the market opportunity is and if your idea will scale.
But maybe you don't want to build a huge business, maybe you just want to create a sustainable and profitable business that gives you more freedom.
In 2011, Tyler quit his job to start a venture backed software startup called Sololist.
He was a first time founder and non technical so he also started learning how to code.
Getting his startup to take off was slow going, so he started doing some freelance work to help pay the bills.
Several of his clients wanted a way to add store locator functionality to their websites.
So on a 30 hour flight from San Francisco to Buenos Aires, Tyler built a store locator SaaS application as a side project.
When he landed, he deployed the code and launched the product and he emailed some of his clients and within 24 hours he had a handful of people paying him $5 a month.
The product was terrible and had a lot of missing functionality but but it did the basic job.
A year later, Solar List still wasn't getting any traction and had to be shut down and Tyler was left with over $50,000 of credit card debt and uncertainty about his future.
He had to dig himself out of a financial hole.
So he started doing more freelance work and putting more time into his Storemapper side project, which by now was doing around $1,000 in monthly recurring revenue.
By being able to spend more time on Storemapper, Tyler was able to grow it to over $5,000 mrr in about nine months and eventually he got it to over $40,000 monthly recurring revenue several years later.
But he built it as a sustainable and profitable micro SaaS company.
It helped him to pay down his credit card debt, travel the world and spend more time on projects he found interesting.
And if building that type of business appeals to you, then you're going to love this episode.
Tyler, welcome to the show.
Tyler Tringas (02:56.220)
Thanks for having me.
Omer (02:57.820)
So what gets you out of bed and or inspires you?
Like, do you have maybe a quote you can share with us?
Tyler Tringas (03:02.860)
Yeah, I think something that definitely keeps me going.
I have this theory that building a business is actually very similar to writing A novel.
They both sort of require you to kind of get up every day and keep kind of slogging away at this thing without a lot of certainty that it's going to be a big success in the end.
And so I lifted this theme that I see again and again and again in Hemingway.
A version of it is the best way is to always stop when you're going good and to know what will happen next.
If you do that every day when you're writing a novel, you will never be stuck.
And that is the most valuable thing I can tell you.
So try to remember it.
And that kind of helps me really keep a sort of reasonable pace so that you can focus on success in the long run rather than success in any individual day.
Omer (03:46.110)
So what does that mean to you on a daily basis?
Like, does that mean when things are going well, stop?
I don't know.
Tyler Tringas (03:52.030)
Yeah.
No, I mean, yeah, really it is.
I think it's about taking a longer view.
So I really believe that, you know, it really encapsulates a lot of things that I believe that I guess are a little bit contrarian to how a lot of people approach building businesses or doing work.
Is one of them is like sort of uncoupling the conscious, you know, or the sort of visible doing work of sort of sitting at your desk typing into keys as work versus resting, rejuvenating, Letting your subconscious work over a problem and find a sort of better way.
That sometimes the best thing to do to sort of move forward is to not necessarily be sort of overtly working.
And it also kind of, I think, reframes a sense of progress on a broader timescale.
Right.
So you do stuff that means that you can keep at it for months and years at a time rather than kind of focusing on, you know, did I sort of hit my seven pomodoros today?
Kind of thing?
Which is valuable in and of itself, but I think it's better to have a wider perspective.
Omer (04:53.260)
You know, you just opened up a can of worms.
And I think we could have a conversation just about this topic for this episode.
Tyler Tringas (05:01.370)
Okay.
Omer (05:01.850)
But I don't think we should.
Tyler Tringas (05:04.410)
We'll do a follow up.
Omer (05:06.090)
Yeah, yeah, no, definitely.
Because it's a topic that's really of interest to me as well.
And I think there's a lot there in terms of thinking about building a business, about work and personal life, about how much you should hustle, how much you should rest, all of these things.
It's a fascinating topic.
But let's talk about the business stuff today.
Tyler Tringas (05:30.980)
Okay.
Fair enough.
Omer (05:33.140)
So right now you're a general partner at Earnest Capital.
So tell us a little bit about that business, like what's it about?
Who are you trying to help?
Tyler Tringas (05:42.499)
Yeah, Earnest Capital is an early stage fund we invest in, I call it funding for Bootstrappers.
So it's the kind of early stage capital that I would really have preferred to have when I was building my last business.
So we make an early stage investment, usually at the very initial stages of building the business, but you've sort of launched a product and gotten it out there.
And we also provide a sort of large array of mentorship for the founders that we back.
So we have around 30 incredibly experienced founders and operators that are both sort of invested in your long term success as a part of Earnest and there to help you along the way.
Omer (06:22.350)
Great.
And we're going to talk more about Earnest Capital a little later.
I want to start this conversation by talking about Storemapper, which was a SaaS product and business that you launched, built and sold.
And so I want to tell the story about that and then we'll talk more about Earnest Capital.
So for people who don't know your story, tell me about storemapper.
What is that product and again, what is it designed to do for who?
Tyler Tringas (06:55.720)
Yeah, storemapper is a product that is essentially store locators as a service.
So you know, there's this pretty growing market segment of e commerce merchants.
The sort of prototypical example is some business who they launch on Kickstarter, they go online first and then at a certain point they get access to a distributor who says, you know, I can put your product in 50 stores around the New England area and you sign up for that and all of a sudden you know, you need a way to tell your customers where they can buy your product in the real world.
And Google doesn't know that.
Google knows you know where there's a Walmart, but they don't know what's inside the Walmart per se.
So store locators are really valuable source of information for your customers.
And we built a tool that sort of was a plug and play version of that for merchants.
And then it layered in a bunch of really interesting sort of analytics because that turns out to be quite an interesting and valuable search when tell a merchant, hey, where can I buy your product near me?
But at the end of the day it was solving that pain point of just building a store locator app.
Omer (08:03.030)
So how did you come up with the idea for that business?
Tyler Tringas (08:05.910)
Well, it was pretty simple in the Sense that I was basically doing consulting, front end and back end development work primarily for Shopify merchants.
So this was about between six and seven years ago.
And the Shopify store, Shopify itself, the platform was, was growing extremely rapidly.
They were adding tons of merchants and almost everybody needed some amount of kind of tweaks, little front end tweaks to their themes or you know, little custom apps to sync to their inventory management system or something like that.
And I was doing that as a freelancer to extend my personal Runway because I was actually working on a more traditional sort of venture scale startup, which is an entirely separate story.
But I was doing that nights and weekends to keep adding a bit of income.
And I was facing that sort of classic problem of, you know, I was trading my hours for money.
And what I really wanted was something that had a bit of recurring revenue.
So I was sort of constantly scanning and looking for a way to, to swap out that hourly work for something that would generate recurring revenue.
And it just turned out that within a coincidental two week period, I think three of my clients all asked for a store locator to be built and they wanted it, you know, made from scratch.
I thought, well, there must be some sort of drop in version of this.
It's incredibly common UI pattern on the Internet.
And there was sort of one or two things that were incredibly old and very bad and there really just wasn't a good go to solution for this.
So I kind of specked out, could I turn this into, instead of, you know, kind of just a consulting project, could I turn into a SaaS?
And it looked doable and did about maybe a couple of hours of diligence on it technically.
And then I went back to my clients and they said, okay, you know, I've looked at this and you know, here's the hourly budget for that.
It's going to cost like two or three thousand dollars to build this.
And all of them were like, sure, no problem, great.
So I sort of established like that there was a pretty strong willingness to pay for this solution and that I could turn it into a SaaS and sat down on a single flight from San Francisco Cisco to Buenos Aires, Argentina and bashed out a minimum viable product and landed and sent it to my every kind of e commerce client I ever had and said, hey, here's this drop in version of a store locator, would you like to sign up for it?
And five of them signed up within 36 hours.
Omer (10:30.200)
Nice, nice.
But from what I understand, that product wasn't very good.
Tyler Tringas (10:36.920)
No it was really bad.
I mean, this was, I think maybe less than 18 months after the Lean Startup had been published and everybody was really experimenting with the sort of limits of minimum viable product.
I think now there's a much healthier discussion around what does that actually mean?
And should it be minimum delightful product or something like that?
But at the time, you know, this was the sort of conventional wisdom was, you know, build the absolute bare minimum product that sort of, I say, like does what it says on the, on the label.
Right.
You know, it technically you could embed a snippet of JavaScript and there would be something approximating a store locator on your website.
It blocked all kinds of the basic features that you would assume would be sort of standard issue for a SaaS product that now you almost probably wouldn't even consider shipping.
It wouldn't send email receipts, it didn't have a way to reset your password.
You know, I mean, it just lacked everything except it did, you know, technically do what it was supposed to do.
Omer (11:39.090)
And people used it.
Tyler Tringas (11:40.460)
Yeah, yeah, people paid for it.
Omer (11:42.780)
So you went from having this idea to building the product and getting customers, what, in a matter of days?
Tyler Tringas (11:53.100)
Yes.
Yeah.
Omer (11:55.180)
Well, I guess the idea was probably, maybe that was simmering for a while, but from the point you started building it, I guess, yeah.
Tyler Tringas (12:02.060)
I mean, I think if you go to the very first inkling of the idea was probably two weeks.
So I mean, the clients needed this done, right.
So, you know, I had to either build it custom for them on a reasonable timescale or build the SaaS version and deliver that instead.
And so it was a really rapid turnaround.
Omer (12:19.000)
Now you described Storemapper as a micro SaaS.
So what do you mean by that term?
Tyler Tringas (12:24.200)
Yeah, I mean micro SaaS I think is just a really exceptional business model that is based around a recurring revenue product that is sort of small enough in scope that a solo founder or a small team can provide profitably operate the business, continue growing it, and generally sort of decide how much they want to step on the gas in terms of taking it from a sort of passive lifestyle business to a high growth business.
All of that is sort of up to you, but it can be small and just sort of continue to be profitable and small for one person or a small team.
Omer (13:01.500)
Got it.
How much did you end up selling that business for?
Can you talk about that?
Tyler Tringas (13:06.320)
I can't say the exact price.
Like most kind of private transactions, that part is, is generally not public information for sort of good reason.
And the reason why you hear that A lot is the folks who buy these businesses rightfully say if that price gets out, then everybody is going to benchmark against it, but they don't have the full information about the business.
So I, as a person who buys software businesses, is now going to constantly have to sort of defend and explain why your business is different from Storemapper.
And so I can't say exactly how much it was.
I have described it as, you know, not exactly sail off into the sunset forever and retire money, but definitely level up money.
I think my friend ADP NAR described it that way as well, it's sort of enough money to put really any next sort of venture on the table as a reasonable thing to do, but not enough to stop working forever.
Omer (13:59.770)
Okay, cool.
How much was the business generating when you sold in terms of MRR?
Tyler Tringas (14:04.070)
I want to say it was around 40k USD MRR, but it's been a while now.
Omer (14:10.710)
40k MRR.
Okay, let's just go with that number as a ballpark.
And the business was entirely bootstrapped, right?
Tyler Tringas (14:19.390)
Yes.
Yeah.
Omer (14:20.390)
And how long did it take you to go from that flight where you built the MVP to the point that you ended up selling the business?
Tyler Tringas (14:30.780)
It was about five years in total from the first line of code to selling the business.
Omer (14:35.660)
Okay, cool.
So I want to kind of dig into that time, like what happened in between that flight and that sale.
Tyler Tringas (14:41.980)
Sure.
Omer (14:42.540)
I mean, there's a lot to cover, but let's try to do the best we can to try and number one, tell that story and two, hopefully learn some key insights from you that people listening to this interview can hopefully take away.
So you've got it out there, you've got five customers starting to use the product.
Where did you go from there?
Tyler Tringas (15:04.280)
So at the time, Storemapper was a classic sort of side project situation for me.
So I had two other things taking up the bulk of my time.
The first one was I was working on a company called Solar List and that was a sort of traditional like venture scale type of business.
We were out there fundraising and trying to sort of build the company, and then I was freelancing because neither Storemapper nor Solarless were actually paying my bills.
So I was doing sort of 40 hours a week of solar list, 40 hours a week of freelancing, and I had a tiny sliver of time left over to try to keep Storemapper sort of stable and growing.
And so, you know, I think that's something that a lot of founders can empathize with, where you've built a Little product, you have a particular insight, but you really just have, you know, a sliver of nights and weekends to allocate to the entire spectrum of building new features, answering support requests, onboarding new customers, building marketing copy, all of that.
And it's really, really hard for me.
I just kind of had to massively triage what I would actually do because just didn't have the time to do any of the stuff that you would consider totally reasonable and necessary.
Were you allocating your full time attention to it?
So I mean that included stuff like I wouldn't build features until they were just absolutely necessary, you know, so, so the idea of, of email receipts, you know, for the first month or two I just emailed everybody in Gmail and it took me, you know, literally two minutes to just email them a sort of copy pasted receipt.
And then by month three, I finally decided like, okay, this is now no longer efficient.
Now I need to build the feature to send email receipts, right?
You know, just really just, just in time delivery of features as they were sort of required.
And then I think the other sort of big thing was just really, really focusing on retention because I think it's okay if you grow really slowly.
As long as you have super high retention, you're still going to continue to get value out of the business.
You're going to continue growing that MRR over time.
But if you have a leaky bucket, then all of a sudden you have the sort of treadmill is turned up higher and you have to keep pace just to kind of stay in one place.
So if you really zero in on, on retention during that side project phase, I think it's, it's a good way to make sure that you'll still accumulate value in the business even if you're only allocating a tiny amount of time.
What happened for me where that all sort of changed was the startup that I was working on, I finally just had to basically shut down.
So at that point Storemapper was doing around, I think maybe $1,000 a month in revenue.
And so that it had been going for, I'm gonna say somewhere between six and nine months, but I just completely ran out of money.
I was living in New York, I was burning through a ton of cash trying to just build this other startup.
We had raised a bit of money, spent that money and just sort of completely failed to raise.
You know, we realized we needed to raise several million dollars to actually build the business that we wanted to build and just basically decided we couldn't do it.
Had to shut down the company, I had about $50,000 in credit card debt and this little side business at a thousand dollars a month.
And so I left New York, shut down the business and decided to kind of go full time on a mix of growing Storemapper and continuing to freelance for Shopify clients.
And so that was a change in trajectory at that point.
Omer (18:32.030)
Why did you decide to focus on storemapper?
Like at $1,000 a month doesn't seem like a life changing business.
So what was it that you saw there that motivated you to spend more time on it?
Tyler Tringas (18:47.480)
First of all, it was very cheap.
I think it was at that point the average revenue was about $7.
So we're talking about over 100 customers who are paying for this thing, which is not nothing.
And I feel like when you run a business as a side project like that, for a while you just have a gut feeling that there's a ton of low hanging fruit that you're not plucking, you're not harvesting the fruit.
You can just feel there are customer acquisition channels that if you put a little bit more effort into, you could shake the tree and more customers would come out.
You get requests from customers that, you know, okay, if you build these couple of features, they would probably pay substantially more than they currently are.
You could add a premium plan and shove a bunch of features in there and everybody would happily pay five times as much.
Um, that was the general sense that I got from that business at the time.
And it was the only thing I had that was generating recurring revenue.
And it's a lot easier to grow a recurring revenue product than it is to sort of start something else.
So I continued to sort of split my time between freelance work and growing that business to basically just try to sort of dig myself out of a financial hole, really.
Omer (19:53.440)
So, yeah, so let's talk about how you got those first hundred customers.
I mean, it's clear you didn't have a lot of time up until then to spend on building and growing the business.
So how did you get the word out?
How did you go about getting those first hundred customers?
Tyler Tringas (20:16.100)
Yeah, I mean, well, I used one of the pretty classic cheats, which is to, you know, to sort of latch onto a fast growing platform.
And in this case it was Shopify.
But I think it's a pretty well worn tactic for a lot of folks who want to, you know, bootstrap a SaaS business or build a micro SaaS, is to find a platform that is growing really quickly.
This is the sort of playbook of let's say Barometrics, who jumped onto Stripe when it was growing really rapidly.
Folks like Buffer were getting onto all the social networks as they were massively expanding.
You can sort of just grab a hold and follow along.
And as long as those platforms continue to acquire more customers, there's going to be a steady flow of folks, some percentage of whom are actually your customers.
So my version of that was, well, first just getting listed in the App Store at the time, you know, we just sort of found a gap there, and we were the only store locator app in the App Store, so anybody who searched there found us.
And then I started just basically sort of trolling the forum.
So one of the things I often tell folks at this very early stage is to really look for places where your customers congregate, and sometimes there isn't one.
And that can be really tough.
Like if your customers are all totally siloed and there's no way to find any, any group of them hanging out anywhere.
But in this case, my customers were Shopify merchants, and they were all on the Shopify forums trying to figure out solutions to various problems.
And a good chunk of them were actively saying, hey, where can I get help building a store locator?
And I would just sort of chime in and say, well, you can use my tool here.
And I also just sort of would.
Would allocate a little bit of time to just go and be helpful on some of the most active threads and then have my little forum signature, you know, kind of say, you know, also check out my store locator app without sort of overtly kind of spamming them for.
For my product.
Just be helpful and let that sort of sell itself.
Omer (22:18.050)
And that was it.
I mean, there was no kind of, you know, trying to run ads or cold emailing people or anything like that.
Tyler Tringas (22:27.840)
No, I mean, I never, in the entire history of Storm App, I really never ran any substantial, you know, outbound or paid advertising or anything like that.
1.
One thing that I did do, which I don't know if it would work these days, but I also, you know, because what I was doing was a substitute for something that you might hire a developer to do as a custom project, I did set up a sort of alert on all the different kind of jobs platforms like Upwork, which was, I think, Odesk at the time, and that sort of thing.
And anytime someone would sort of post a gig for a developer to build them a store locator, I would sort of chime in and say I'd apply for the job.
For $10 or something and tell them like, hey, maybe you should use my SaaS product instead of hiring someone to build this, this for you as a one off project.
And that worked pretty well actually.
I mean, at the time, you know, it's not a particularly scalable channel.
But yeah, when you're talking about 100 customers or fewer, if you get 25 customers that way, it moves the needle for you, you know.
Omer (23:32.380)
And you talked about the importance of retention.
So what were you doing to improve retention?
Tyler Tringas (23:41.020)
Well, at those very early stages, what I mostly did was just do the work on the customer's behalf.
I do think there's an over tendency when you're building software to sort of want to just make the users use your product.
You've spent all this time writing code and building this SaaS app and the whole point is that you're not spending your hours doing something non scalable.
But at the very beginning, frequently.
One of the few features that I did build is the ability for me to sort of log in as any of my users.
And I use that a ton.
Basically anytime that someone would have a problem, instead of sort of bashing out like, you know, check the faq, right?
Or like, here's the link to the FAQ article, I would first just do it for them and then also share the FAQ article so that if they ever came into something similar, you know, they would sort of have that for reference.
But just solving the problem for them first I think is it's really powerful.
I mean, you know, you can do it once or twice and you basically get a customer for life.
So that was kind of one, one trick.
It's also just about focusing on it, to be honest.
Omer (24:49.890)
Were you getting a lot of customer complaints or feature requests?
I mean, if you're not spending that much time in terms of improving the product and you're practicing that just in time or the last wait as long as possible before you add a feature, was that creating some frustrations or problems with customers?
Tyler Tringas (25:12.120)
It created a little bit.
I think I gave myself a good amount of slack in two ways.
The first one was just, you know, it was just ludicrously underpriced, which of course is something that, you know, over time when you put on your business strategy, hat you want to tell people, look, you should probably raise your prices and you know, try to figure out what is the sort of optimal willingness to pay from your customer base.
But you know, when you just have a product that is so cheap, but you're also solving the problem, it's just very hard for people to really meaningfully complain.
Now, that's not a universal truth.
I know a lot of folks have the sort of opposite experience where they price their product very cheaply and they get tons and tons of complaints, and then they 10x the price, get a totally different sort of caliber of customer, and all of a sudden people are paying 10 times as much, but they're also a lot nicer and send in fewer complaints.
I think maybe my theory there is that our product, even though it was very cheap, it sort of necessarily implied a certain amount of scale in the business in the sense that, you know, if you are being distributed in a hundred stores or sufficiently numerous stores to need a store locator, you probably have a pretty decent sized business already.
You know, you're not sort of one person pre revenue who cares that much about $10 one way or the other.
So that, yeah, I think we were still attracting that same customer base if our product had cost $100 a month or something.
But we just got good customers and they were just, you know, far happier with that than paying a front end developer thousands of dollars to build something for them.
And the other thing was being like very front and center that I was a sort of, you know, solo indie developer.
Actually, in the footer of the web app, there was just like my face from a shot of me in Bali with the monkeys in the background.
And it was just sort of like, hey, you know, I'm Tyler, I'm one person, I run this entire product myself, and thank you so much for paying for it.
And I'm doing the best I can.
You know, that part was implied, but, you know, and that actually worked.
You know, people really were willing to cut me a huge amount of slack because they like backing sort of indie small teams and developers doing cool stuff with their lives, I guess.
Omer (27:22.470)
You know, did you have a free plan or was it just they had to pay to start using the product?
Tyler Tringas (27:29.390)
No, I never had a free plan.
Omer (27:30.750)
Okay.
And was there a particular reason for that?
I mean, I know you said it was kind of priced very low anyway, but like, you know, sometimes that could be a good way to get the word out there.
And especially if you're kind of, kind of going organically and, you know, going in these forums and places and telling people about it, sometimes it's easier to get people onto some sort of freemium type product and then move up from there.
But that wasn't something you considered?
Tyler Tringas (27:59.750)
Yeah, I never considered it.
I mean, I think it's a Valid strategy for certain products.
I knew that my product was delivering immediate value.
That was a substitute for lots of other expenses, in which case I don't think it makes sense to have a free plan.
You know, if, you know you're saving your customer thousands of dollars, you should just charge for it.
I think freemium works more for products that it's not, you know, obviously clear exactly how much value is going to be generated or whether or not it's going to be worth it for them.
So you have something like what's a freemium notion?
Is a freemium tool that I'm using right now, you know, and it's sort of a note taking collaboration tool.
And it's not just so obvious that this is going to save me a ton of money or be something that I absolutely need.
In which case freemium makes a ton of sense.
You know, you, you kind of give it to everybody.
They try it out and the people who end up being die hard are the ones who actually pay you.
I don't think my product fit that profile.
And the other reason I just didn't even consider it because I wasn't a very good software developer in the sense that I was sort of.
I didn't really love the term self taught, but I was, you know, recently taught myself to code using freely available tools on the Internet.
Probably starting that process about nine months before I actually launched storemapper.
So I wasn't a fantastic developer.
I was doing everything on Heroku.
It wasn't particularly sort of optimized.
So I really did not think that I could handle a freemium product in the sense of supporting, you know, 99 free users for every one paying user.
I just thought that was a great way for me to lose a bunch of money and get in way over my head.
Omer (29:36.210)
Yeah.
I'm glad you brought up the thing about you not being a great developer because, you know, initially when I heard your story, it was like, yeah, this is a really interesting story.
Should talk more to Tyler.
And it sounded like, you know, here's a developer who was, you know, doing some consulting, some freelance work, came up with this idea and then went into the sunset building his own product.
But you weren't a developer.
Tyler Tringas (30:10.720)
No, no.
I mean, I was a hacker sort of frantically trying to keep my head above water essentially.
I mean, I learned to code because, I'll say maybe two years prior to launching Storemapper, I had an idea for a software business.
My background was in the clean tech industry.
I degree in economics.
I didn't grow up Making websites on Angelfire or anything like that.
You know, I was never really into tech per se, other than as a sort of means to an end.
And I quit my last job, I was working for Bloomberg doing kind of long term energy market forecasting.
And I had an idea for a software company that intersected with the industry that I knew well, which was the solar energy market.
And so I was in that classic sort of space of okay, I'm the business guy, I know this market super well, but I need a technical co founder to help me build software.
And I spent about a year of my life sort of failing to launch on that trajectory.
I had kind of three separate kind of massive failures in terms of it took a lot of time and energy to try to find someone to just write the code for me.
And eventually I was learning a little bit along the way because I had this sense that I needed to know enough to be dangerous, enough to not sound like an idiot, or to be able to go one layer deeper when discussing technical constraints or features that should be built.
But I wasn't really learning with the intent to learn how to code.
But this sort of entire wasted year of my life made me sort of quite motivated to say, well, I'll just try and build this product.
And I sort of locked myself in a, in a room for about six weeks and taught myself to code and built the, you know, the first version of the solarless product that I was working on.
And that was, I'm going to say, maybe six to nine months before the launch of, of Storm Mapper.
So I sort of taught myself to code enough to, to build the product through that process.
I was going onto like Odesk and all these sort of little gig sites and I basically would apply for small jobs that I didn't really know how to do.
I kind of thought I vaguely knew how to do it, but I didn't definitely know how to do them.
And I would win the jobs and then get paid to sort of learn how to do the project and then deliver it to the client, which is a great way to learn to code.
Actually it's both a really excellent motivation hack and you know, you get paid to learn but, but that was maybe, you know, four or five months before I launched Doormapper, that I was doing that.
Omer (32:42.600)
So, so when you decided that you wanted to learn to code, what technologies or programming language did you decide to pick and how did you go about learning it?
Tyler Tringas (32:57.520)
I went for Ruby on Rails.
And to me, I feel like in particularly if you're gonna Be sort of, you know, quote unquote, self taught.
Omer (33:04.120)
Right.
Tyler Tringas (33:04.360)
You're gonna be not interacting with a class and an instructor.
The main thing that you need is a really active community of folks out there helping each other because you're just going to spend 99% of your time googling stuff.
You're going to try to find the closest public solution that you can, then sort of tweak a little bit to make it work for what you're trying to do.
And so how active the community is is the critical variable for choosing a platform to me.
And at that time it was a no brainer there.
There was, you know, really no other community that was nearly as active as the Ruby and Rails community.
And I essentially just allocated a reasonably small budget in the scheme of things.
Call it, I would say certainly less than $1,000, probably much less than that.
Probably closer to $500 of buying just every ebook and screencast course I could get my hands on.
And I would just sit there and, you know, when I wasn't coding, I would just sit and, you know, watch hours and hours of entire screencast courses, you know, just to sort of digest them and then come back later and pull them up when a relevant problem sort of appeared.
But yeah.
Omer (34:13.920)
Did you ever buy the, what's it called, the Ruby on Rails tutorial by Michael Hartle?
Tyler Tringas (34:20.480)
Yeah, absolutely.
Yeah, that was one of the first ones I bought.
Omer (34:23.160)
Yeah, I got to say, even now I think that's one of the best resources out there and I'd be happy to give that a plug.
I mean, I think it's, let me just look it up.
It's like railstutorial.org and I think that is a great resource for learning Ruby on Rails.
And I actually went through that years ago to learn Ruby on Rails.
Ultimately I, I just couldn't grok with Ruby and I ended up picking Python instead.
But yeah, no, I think that's a, that's a great resource.
Tyler Tringas (34:54.340)
Cool.
Omer (34:54.620)
Okay, great.
So we got the coding under our belt.
You've got the products, you've got over a hundred customers, you've been focusing on retention, but you had to get to, I'm guessing like a few thousand customers to get to 40k.
Mrr.
So how did you grow further?
I mean, were there new things you were doing or did you just keep doing the same things that we talked about earlier?
Tyler Tringas (35:22.750)
Yeah, I mean, I would say after I shut down the other startup and was focused full time on, you know, Stormhapper and freelancing, it took about six months to go from 1000Mrr to around what I sort of considered to be, you know, break even for me as a founder, that I could sort of live off the revenue just of the business.
So call it somewhere between 7 and 8k.
Mrr for me at the time felt like, okay, like this is something I could be focused on full time now.
And that was about six months.
That was mostly a process of just a little bit more of everything on the sort of growth side of things and then, you know, massively increasing the average revenue per user.
So that was, you know, building a ton more features that then let me introduce kind of higher tiered plans and convince people to sort of upgrade from that to say, hey, you know, not only can we sort of just add this UI on your website, but we can generate analytics and we can tell you, you know, did, you know, you know, 150 people searched for where they could buy your product in Berlin last week and you don't have anywhere in Berlin, so maybe you should open a store in Berlin.
And by the way, if you want this, you know, it's going to cost you quite a bit more.
So that was probably most of the process there was basically growing that and then from there I think, you know, another piece of the puzzle was trying to add a bit of inherent virality into the business.
So one of the nice benefits is of course we're this very small niche product.
We ranked fairly well in Google just by virtue of it being more or less the only thing that existed in the concept of store locator software or something.
But it's not like there was a huge amount of search volume for that.
So it was tough to kind of get more eyeballs until we kind of realized or I was just sitting there thinking, looking at the analytics side of things and saying, oh well, the total views on all of the store locators on our customers websites is like a million a month.
Maybe I should add a little Powered by storemapper link on all of those and maybe some of those people will actually sign up.
It was about one line of code and it was definitely the most profitable line of code that I wrote in the entire five years.
But we started to get a bit of a loop there where, you know, every new customer that came on board actually made it incrementally more likely that they would kind of essentially refer us customers by other people seeing their store locator and then deciding they wanted one for their website.
Omer (37:56.010)
So I don't know what that squeaking was in the background Some kind of
Tyler Tringas (38:00.850)
a bird on my Windsor.
Omer (38:03.370)
So you're in.
Just for people who don't know you're in Rio and I had you turn off your ac.
We didn't get that noise in the background.
Tyler Tringas (38:12.340)
Yeah, it's hot and sweaty in here and.
And there's a tropical bird out of my window, so that's funny.
Omer (38:18.940)
All right.
Tyler Tringas (38:19.380)
The travails of tropical life.
Yeah.
All right.
Omer (38:22.700)
So I'm curious how much time you were spending on Storemapper at this point.
You said you kind of went all in.
So was this, you know, 40, 50 hours a week?
Like, what.
How much of your time was being spent on Storemapper?
And also I'm curious, like, how are you splitting that time between sort of growth marketing and working on the product?
Tyler Tringas (38:46.770)
Yeah, I would say that I don't think I ever really exceeded 40 hours a week on Storemapper because I was steadily becoming a better and better freelance developer as well, and was starting to be able to charge something approximating market rates as a sort of Ruby developer for e commerce businesses and had a couple of steady clients and had a lot of debt I was trying to pay off quickly.
So I definitely continued to have at least sort of 30 hours a week of client work for several years, even after I sort of went full time, quote unquote.
So it's definitely still probably under 40 hours, you know, probably working maybe 60 hours a week.
And splitting that between client work and stormhapper, I didn't really, you know, I. I think this is one of the things that, that people underestimate about recurring revenue businesses that you can find ones that, that have really strong retention and really low churn is that you really don't need to split your time that aggressively between, like, growth marketing and product.
If you find something that a very high percentage of people who sign up decide that, you know, that.
That they want your product and when they sign up, they stick around.
And so for various periods of time, we had, you know, sort of 1% monthly churn or less.
And that means that you, you don't really need to try to juice your signups that much.
You know, if only a couple of people are signing up a day, but you're keeping one or two of them every single day, you're still going to keep growing pretty effectively.
And so I mostly focused on, you know, optimizing the inbound funnel to a sort of ridiculous degree.
All of our metrics there were really tremendous, but I never really found, and this is something that, you know, sort of later factored into my decision to sell the business is that I never really found a gas pedal for growth.
You know, there just seemed to be a sort of fixed quantity of merchants who sort of would either search in Google and we'd be, you know, their first result, or they would search in the app store of Shopify or BigCommerce or any of those, and we'd be first result or definitely there, and we'd get a huge percentage of those.
And we had a really tightly optimized funnel there.
But I tried a couple of things, but really no experiment ever yielded that fruitful of results in terms of sort of artificially generating growth.
Omer (41:10.760)
Yeah.
Okay, cool.
So you mentioned your inbound funnel and optimizing that.
So what did that look like?
Like, where was the majority of the traffic coming from?
Was it just going directly to a signup page and.
And it was more about sort of the onboarding experience or, you know, was it kind of more sophisticated than, than that?
Tyler Tringas (41:33.990)
Yeah, absolutely.
So.
So I mean, I think I take optimizing the, the sort of inbound funnel very seriously.
And I think for me it's hard to.
To describe it other than just sort of being incredibly empathetic for your customers.
And you know, one of the things I think is to sort of.
And I think, oh man, I forget the author's name.
There's a book called don't make me think on sort of web design and user experience.
And the sort of summary of the book in one sentence is basically, you should sort of treat your customers as if they were kind of attention deficit and juggling while they were trying to use your product.
You know, like, they basically just have this minimal amount of, of sort of brain power and bandwidth to actually allocate to solving problems that your product puts up in front of them.
And you should do whatever you can to smooth every single rough edge that they encounter.
So if they arrive on a screen and even two people tell you, what should I do with this screen?
I would go in and generate a one minute tightly edited screencast saying, here's what you do with the screen.
And it would pop up and it would be.
If the screen was eventually supposed to show where you added your locations, instead of showing you, I don't know, some sort of just blanks that say, this is where locations go.
If it was blank, it would show you this screencast that would say, here's how you add locations.
And you just click it and you watch and say, okay, great.
And then you start adding that.
And then I would track, you know, and this is where sort of right when Intercom started to become, you know, a really, really full featured product with a lot of automations and you track all of these things.
I would say okay, you know, if they haven't added any locations within 48 hours, trigger an email and CC me to say, hey, I saw you haven't added anything, here's a video, here's an article and also I'm on cc, so just reply back if you have any questions whatsoever and just really kind of ridiculously over providing sort of resources for folks to make sure that they just never get hung up on any sort of part of the onboarding process.
And then basically just this was sort of a benefit of our product, which I kind of often tell people to look for when they're thinking about business ideas is, you know, it's kind of a set it and forget it product in the sense that, you know, you have to set it up, you have to install on your website, you have to upload all your locations, but you know, you probably go back maybe once a quarter and update the locations otherwise you're just going to basically keep paying for the product in perpetuity.
So it made sense to really invest a lot of energy into the onboarding side of things because I had a very high degree of confidence that if they got to those milestones that they would stick around and have a really strong sort of lifetime value.
So I think that's really important is sort of tracking progress, setting up automations and then creating that sort of loop that you're seeing those problem areas and then pushing more and more sort of solutions in an automated fashion for customers as they're signing up.
And then eventually that sort of translated into something that we added in when we had a customer support team which was really tightening that loop, which was sort of every customer support inquiry.
It's not just a question of how do I solve this problem for the customer, it's is this something that we should be pre solving for every other future customer?
Right.
Is this a bug that needs to go to the development team?
Is there a missing kind of nuance to one of the help desk articles that would help people not have to contact support in the future and creating that sort of virtuous cycle where you're really thinking about every problem?
How can I make sure this never happens again for for every other future customer?
Omer (45:13.900)
Let's talk a little bit about earnest capital, which is your current gig.
You mentioned at the start of this interview that it's really, you know, a fund for bootstrap SaaS companies, when you say early stage, like, you know, you talked about, okay, they should have a product, what other criteria do you look for when trying to identify a company worth investing in?
Tyler Tringas (45:41.840)
So the first and most important criteria is are they aligned with what we're trying to do?
Right.
And so I used the term bootstrapped, even though, you know, there's been a lot of confusion over it, which, you know, I expected.
Bootstrapped, to me has come to mean, like, even though there's this very narrow definition of bootstrapped, which means, you know, building the business without any outside capital, it's also sort of come to mean a sort of cultural set of, of priorities and goals and values, right.
That include things like, to me, I think, you know, valuing sustainability of the business over growth at all costs, right?
So you want to build a business that is likely to stick around and isn't fragile and waiting to blow up if at, you know, the slightest problem, that's sort of robust.
A company that is calm companies, right.
So this is derived a lot from Jason Fried and David Heinemara Hansen's.
They're in all of their books.
But including the most recent one doesn't have to be crazy at work.
You know that when you're bootstrapping these businesses, you want to build a calm company.
You want to build a certain amount of slack into the business so that you don't have to drive your employees and your customers and everyone right to this sort of bleeding hedge of their capabilities.
Because, you know, they're, they're humans and they have other things they can do in their lives.
So if you're sort of aligned with those values and that leads you to think, you know, probably, well, you know, I'm not going to raise venture capital.
I'm just going to bootstrap my business.
But actually I would like a bit of early stage capital to get me through the part where the business can't necessarily pay my bills.
And also some mentors would be great and it would be excellent to be plugged into a network and not feel like I'm, I'm going at this alone.
If that all sounds great to you, then that's the kind of first filter.
From there we're generally looking for.
The stage of the business is usually after the product is sort of launched.
MVPs are fine, but it should be kind of doing what it says on the label and it should have a bit of revenue.
We don't really want to take the risk of will anybody pay for this because I think that is a big hurdle for a lot of businesses or a lot of business ideas.
We are not unicorn hunting.
You don't have to have a roadmap for building it into a billion dollar business.
So we also have to take a bit less risk.
So we're not comfortable sort of investing in folks who just have a PowerPoint or an idea.
They do need to have a proven ability to build the product and get at least some amount of people to pay for it.
From there, it's a question of what kinds of businesses are in what I consider my circle of competence as well as the broader group of mentors that we have.
We have about 30 experienced founders and operators who are sort of help.
They both help me and they help the founders.
And so we're looking for stuff that is generally in that circle of competence.
So B2B SaaS is definitely our wheelhouse.
If you're building a software as a service business that is for a sort of niche business vertical, we're 100% going to be very aligned and then kind of generally expanding out from there, you know, maybe on a couple of different metrics, but not too wildly different.
So I'm not really interested in an ads based social network for preschoolers or something.
You know, it's, it's got to be, you know, something that is sort of directly solving problems.
So an example might be a sort of prosumer paid SaaS business like superhuman for email is getting a lot of traction right now and it's 30 bucks a month for like power email users that I think is also still in our wheelhouse or people selling sort of tutorials and education on a subscription basis.
So it's got recurring revenue, it's got all those metrics you can measure, churn, all that sort of stuff.
It's a, you know, it's for professional development.
So it's really, you know, adding material value.
But it's not technically software.
Right.
It's actually tutorials and screencasts.
We're interested in that kind of stuff and also some areas of e commerce as well.
Omer (49:47.740)
Got it?
Tyler Tringas (49:48.340)
Yeah.
Omer (49:49.980)
Cool.
All right, so we should wrap up now.
So I'm going to go on to the lightning round and ask you seven quick fire questions and just answer them as quickly as you can.
So you ready to go?
Okay, great.
What's the best piece of business advice you've ever received?
Tyler Tringas (50:08.540)
I don't know if this is the best just broad based, but for me it's been particularly relevant in this moment and I think it's Jason Lemkin, who does the Saster conference.
He just tweeted it and said something about, you know, sort of once or twice in your life, you know, someone will give you a shot that you really don't necessarily deserve and that you should just 100%, you know, jump all over it, give it everything to take advantage of that.
And I really feel like that's where I am right now with Earnest Capital.
I mean, I didn't really have a track record as a, you know, in venture capital or any kind of financing.
And, you know, I feel like this window opened for, you know, for me to build this fund and a couple of folks gave me a shot that maybe I didn't necessarily deserve and I'm just pouncing all over it.
Omer (50:55.930)
So that's awesome.
What book would you recommend to our audience and why?
Tyler Tringas (51:02.500)
So I'm sure I'll be the only one who recommends this.
It sort of inspired my quote at the beginning, which is Hemingway on Writing.
It's a collection of quotes and snippets from Ernest Hemingway himself, as well as snippets from his characters in his novels talking about writing because many of them are authors.
I wrote a piece on Medium called Hemingway on Coding, where I sort of extrapolated some of those into lessons for kind of coding and building companies.
I've really found it to be incredibly insightful.
I've probably read it 14 times.
It's great.
Omer (51:36.790)
And the book you mentioned a little earlier, I should also probably call out, is called Don't Make Me Think it's by Steve Krug.
Tyler Tringas (51:43.830)
Yes.
Omer (51:44.390)
And that book is almost 20 years old when it was originally published, but I think it's still a really useful book to think about getting or reading at least.
What's one attribute or characteristic in your mind of a successful entrepreneur?
Tyler Tringas (52:00.640)
To me, I think it's, you know, I often describe people, kind of people say, you know, what are you doing?
I was like, well, I'm sticking with my plan of doing stuff I don't know how to do.
Basically it's just a sort of willingness to sort of give it a shot and feel like you're going to figure it out.
Maybe a sort of irrational level of self confidence to some extent, not necessarily that you already know how to do it, but to be sort of humble and saying, I don't know how to do this, but that doesn't necessarily matter.
I'm still going to try.
I don't know if that's a specific attribute, but that seems to me to be a Common one I find among successful entrepreneurs.
Omer (52:35.810)
What's your favorite personal productivity tool or habit?
Tyler Tringas (52:40.050)
Right now I'm scheduling about a million zoom calls and in person coffees per day and traveling a lot, switching around a bunch of time zones.
So scheduling meetings is pretty much a nightmare for me.
I've been trying X AI which is a sort of scheduling tool that has a mix of kind of personal assistance and AI to help with that.
I'm still not doing a great job of it, but as you know.
But it is definitely making things a lot better than they otherwise would be.
Omer (53:10.520)
What's a new or crazy business idea you'd love to pursue if you had the extra time?
Tyler Tringas (53:15.000)
My crazy business idea I guess probably every entrepreneur has an idea for a personal CRM, but I have this idea.
I wrote a post recently about how I like to email.
Basically just kind of talking about how I think we should have some kinds of email that go back to the old idea of correspondence sort of, you know, much longer form things that you write to people that you're just catching up on them that you know, it's not part of your inbox zero flow.
It doesn't demand that you give an immediate response.
It's something that you know, you can trade back and forth, you know, every few months or something with with folks that you're trying to maintain a relationship across distances.
And I would love to build a sort of slow personal CRM that was really focused on maintaining relationships in that kind of way rather than pulling in all of your LinkedIn and Twitter data and giving you all the latest real time information.
Just something that tracked those kinds of longer term relationships over the sort of arc of your career that helped you keep in touch with your high school friends and that person that you used to work with 10 years ago that is still really interesting and all that sort of stuff.
Omer (54:23.550)
What's an interesting or fun fact about you that most people don't know?
Tyler Tringas (54:28.110)
I'm pretty open about my life, so I don't know if there's a lot of things, I mean I think a lot of people may know this if they know anything about me, but I did the whole digital Nomad thing and so when I was building Storemapper, I was living out of a backpack for the better part of five years.
You know, without a doubt a closet or anything.
I highly recommend it to folks.
I think it's totally worth a shot.
Although eventually you do really start to to.
It gives you a much better appreciation of when you actually have a place to live and a closet to put your stuff in and a bed that is reliably comfortable.
But, yeah, I highly recommend it.
If you're on the fence and thinking about it, reach out to me and I'm happy to answer any questions or concerns about the Digital Nomad sort of thing.
Omer (55:15.180)
Cool.
And finally, what's one of your most important passions outside of your work?
Tyler Tringas (55:19.340)
I love rock climbing.
I've always been a very avid rock climber.
It feels to me like physical meditation.
It's one of those things where you're on the wall and, you know, 100% of your brain power and focus is thinking about, where do I put my left hand right now?
And you're not.
You have no background processes running.
You're not thinking about anything else except exactly the moment.
And I find it sort of wonderfully meditative.
And it's just.
Yeah, I love it.
Omer (55:51.200)
So cool.
Awesome.
Well, thank you for joining me, Tyler.
It's been a pleasure.
And it's great to, you know, hear your story about Storemapper and some of the ups and downs of that journey and also kind of finding out more about what you're doing with Earnest Capital.
So if people want to check out storemapper, they can go to Storemapper.
Co Earnest Capital.
Head over to earnestcapital.com that's earnest with an A. E, A.
Not Earnest as in Hemingway.
Tyler Tringas (56:25.740)
Like earning money.
Omer (56:26.940)
Earning money.
That's right.
That's a good way to think about it.
And then you also blog@tylertrinkus.com and people can find a bunch of great content there and more about your story with Storemapper.
And if people want to get in touch with you, what's the best way for them to do that?
Tyler Tringas (56:43.710)
I mean, I like email.
And then these days I'm finding it's a lot easier to use Twitter.
So I'm Tyler Tringas on Twitter.
My DMs are open there for sort of quick inquiries.
But, yeah, I mean, I also love getting email.
So my email's publicly on all of my websites, so it's easy to find.
Omer (57:02.190)
Okay, cool.
Tyler Tringas (57:03.470)
Yeah, great.
Omer (57:05.470)
Well, thanks.
It's been a pleasure.
And have fun the rest of the day in Rio.
Tyler Tringas (57:11.120)
Yeah, awesome.
Thanks so much.
This has been great.
Omer (57:13.360)
It's been a pleasure.
Cheers, man.
Tyler Tringas (57:14.800)
Cheers.
