Omer (00:11.840)
Welcome to another episode of the SaaS Podcast.
I'm your host, Omer Khan, and this is the show where I interview proven founders and industry experts who share their stories, strategies, and insights to help you build, launch, and grow your SaaS business.
Today's interview is with Jim Belosick.
Jim is the founder and CEO of ShortStack, a tool that helps you build contests, sweepstakes, and data collection forms that you can use on Facebook, mobile and the web to help you convert more of your online followers to leads and customers.
Jim founded ShortStack in 2010 and has bootstrapped the company all the way.
Jim, welcome to the show.
Jim Belosic (00:53.680)
Thanks for having me.
Omer (00:54.960)
So I've told our audience just a little bit about you.
Tell us in your own words a little bit more about you personally, and then give us an overview of your product and business.
Jim Belosic (01:04.160)
I am a problem solver by nature.
I hope that that's on my gravestone someday.
I don't have a lot of education besides just what I've learned in the field.
So I think, you know, sometimes when people start out, they think that they have to have advanced degrees or whatever.
I actually just wasn't really cut out for school and didn't make it through my college weeks.
So, you know, I learned a lot out on the field and I continue to enjoy that every day.
Everything that I do it at my office or at my house or in the garage or whatever is always kind of DIY and learn as you go.
So that kind of sums me up.
It drives my wife absolutely insane, especially when, you know, things could be probably be done a lot cleaner and cheaper and quicker if I would have learned a little bit.
But I like to learn from my own mistakes.
So two kids, 4 and 7, and then my extended family here at the office of about 22 people.
And that's really the majority of my life right now.
Omer (02:16.740)
Now, before we dive into more details, we like to kick things off with a success quote to better understand what drives and motivates our guests.
What is one of your favorite success quotes?
Jim Belosic (02:27.380)
My absolute favorite quote is by Ray Bradbury, famous author, and it is jump off the cliff and build your wings on the way down.
It's.
It always has encouraged me to, you know, if I don't know all the answers, at least it keeps me moving forward.
You know, when you think about it, the only way to really know something is to do it.
And when you do it, you got to do it, you know, jump both feet in or, you know, go at it 100% instead of you know, just putting your toe in the water.
You got to dive in.
So, you know, just a visual of jumping off the cliff.
And, you know, I picture Wile E. Coyote trying to make some contraption as he as falling down the cliff.
But it sums up everything I've done.
And that quote also helps explain my strategy to my staff, to my clients, to my family, to everyone.
They understand how I work.
When I wear that quote on a T shirt or scribble it into a bathroom wall or something, I love that
Omer (03:42.530)
quote, and I love the image that it creates, you know, in the sense that, you know, you're kind of jumping with both feet.
You have a.
You have a huge sense of urgency now to go and figure out what you need to before, you know, your journey ends at the bottom of that, that fall.
So, yeah, it's a great quote.
Okay, let's talk about life before Short Stack.
Tell me.
Tell me what you were doing before you started this company.
Jim Belosic (04:13.840)
Well, after I dropped out of college, I had to have a job.
I had to get paid somehow.
So I've always been an artist, and graphic design has always been something that I've been good at, and I really enjoy doing.
So I was a freelance graphic artist for a while and working with a lot of small businesses because basically someone will hire you to do their logo and their business card.
So you're kind of starting out with a small business in their infancy.
As my clientele grew and we kind of aged together and learned together, they started asking me, hey, you know, you did my business card and my brochure.
Can you.
Can you do a website for me?
And being young and hungry, I said, of course.
Even though I've never built a website in my life, of course I figured out how to do it.
And then I really enjoyed the web stuff.
And it was, of course, in 2002, 2003, everyone was jumping onto creating these really terrible websites, now that I look back.
But they'd ask, okay, you built this website, but can it do more?
Can.
Can we have, like, a reservations form or can people request a quote or whatever?
So, you know, my answer was always, yeah, sure, let's.
Let's figure it out.
So I started out as, you know, kind of this freelance graphic artist, and by the time, you know, 2008, 2009 rolled around, I found myself having a really small advertising agency with, you know, three or four employees.
So that helped, you know, kind of set the foundation for what was to become Short Stack and the software company, because acting as an agency and working with the clients, you know, very intimately, we learned, you know, what worked and what didn't.
We learned, you know, what the new and upcoming trends were.
Because your clients will always push you to figure out what's new and best.
You know, they're never happy with doing run of the mill stuff.
So it was a great education.
Omer (06:27.580)
Okay, before we dive into more details about the product itself, let's start by giving the listeners a better understanding of shortstack.
Firstly, who are your target customers?
And secondly, what are the top pain points that you're trying to solve for these people?
Jim Belosic (06:47.020)
Our target customers are anyone from small business owners to, you know, agencies who are creating things for their clients to brands.
We, we kind of serve the, the gamut.
Our, our most successful clients are usually those who are a little bit savvy with, you know, marketing to begin with.
So maybe they have an idea of how marketing works.
You know, how you can't just put up a billboard in the desert, you know, no one will see it, but if you put up a billboard next to a busy freeway, it might help you.
So people who are maybe past the 101 classes of marketing and they're looking to do more in social media or marketing on the web in general, that's really our target.
The pain points that we try and solve are all the complex coding and back end server stuff that you typically have to do when you build these things.
One off.
If I wanted to build a contest or something and have people submit photos and then people could vote on it.
And I want to make sure that people weren't cheating when they voted.
And then I want to randomly pick a winner and do all this other stuff.
You can go to your web guy and he'll probably do it, but it's going to be expensive and time consuming.
So what we decided is if we could make this kind of suite of tools.
You know, I like to think about it like Lego bricks for the web.
So you have all these different pieces that you can put together and kind of help you achieve, you know, whatever your goal is.
So if you want to do a promotion, you know, you can have people submit things and then you're going to add the Lego piece that is voting if you want that.
And then you're going to add the legal, the Lego piece that is, you know, a form to collect email addresses or whatever.
So it's, it's more visual design than code because I mean, my brain does not work when I just stare at code.
It's like looking at the matrix.
So anything visual to me is a lot easier.
And we find that a lot of our clients prefer that as well.
Omer (08:59.590)
Now, you know, when you describe your product, some people might say, well, such so and so does the same thing.
And it's not just your product in, you know, I'm not just picking on that.
I think that could be the case for just about any product out there.
So how do you try to differentiate your offering?
What makes you guys different from what else is out there?
Jim Belosic (09:21.920)
Well, when we first started out and this kind of set the tone for the product and the company as a whole, we, we, we saw some of the, the big guys out there and they were charging, you know, four and five figures per month for a service, which when we looked at it, we thought, geez, we could do this, but you know, we could do it for 30 bucks a month or whatever.
So what we set out to do is give our customers a lot of flexibility and a lot of power at a low price point.
However, with that flexibility and power comes a learning curve.
So we try and have a balance where when you look at us and all of our competitors or any web building software, contest software or whatever, there's the guys who are inexpensive or free and you can do a few things and that's great and it's super simple.
You can probably do it in five minutes.
And then there's the enterprise level guys at the other end where you can do anything you want, but you better know what you're doing.
So we're somewhere in the middle there where you can still start with a template, put something together and it works great.
But if you want to go in and fine tune and really tweak things and make it absolutely pixel perfect or make it meet your exact requirements, you can.
And we provide all kinds of customer support and documentation and everything.
But it's not going to be something that my mom could just do in 20 minutes before lunch and throw up a contest.
She's still on aol, bless her heart.
You know, that's kind of where we find ourselves, but it's kind of a sweet spot in the market.
Omer (11:09.070)
Okay, so going back to what you were Talking about earlier, 2008 to 2009, you had this small agency with a few employees set up and you know, probably what, a year or two later you were going to go and launch this software product.
So where did the idea come from?
Jim Belosic (11:34.430)
The idea was, you know, I wish that I could say, you know, it just came to me in a light bulb moment, but really it came from our clients over a Period of probably six months where everybody was saying, okay, what is this Facebook thing and what can we do with it for business?
You know, in 2008, 2009, Facebook was really starting to snowball and a lot of companies were starting to jump on board.
So we started to look at it and when Facebook platform was released where you could actually build apps within Facebook, that was a big deal.
And we had a lot of demand.
And again, we said, well, we've never done it before, but we'll look into it.
So we started building these apps by hand, one at a time, and they were very successful and our clients were super happy about it.
But then over, you know, a period of about six months, we realized, man, we are doing the same thing over and over again.
And then when some people wanted a contest and they wanted to, you know, for example, all entries stop at midnight on Friday, you know, sorry, but we're not taking any more entries.
Well, we would have to, you know, have someone up at midnight to take the contest down or to disable it.
And we realized this is totally unsustainable.
So what we did is we built a product in house that was just really ugly.
It was just a bunch of PHP code basically.
But it allowed us to make simple changes really quickly without having to rely on our engineers, you know, and our, our code guys, because we were starting to use up all the engineer hours that we had and our account executives or whatever were the ones who wanted all these changes.
So we said, hey, let's just let them make all the changes.
So that rolled on for another two or three months and finally we're looking at hiring more account executives because again, demand was still there.
But we said, wait a second, what if we just took ourselves out of the equation and we just let them have access, let the clients have access to this thing that our account executives are using.
You know, we'll clean it up and we'll put some graphics on it, but then we don't have to do anything and they can, they can do everything they want.
And that was kind of, ah, you know, scary because we had clientele and we were making money.
So to devote our resources into this self serve product was kind of scary.
But we went for it anyway and it worked out okay.
Omer (14:25.220)
So you started off by building Facebook apps for each client that asked and then you found that there was a lot of repetitive work going on.
So you kind of built a tool to help you guys, you know, automate a lot of that, that work and reduce the amount of dev time you were spending on that and then eventually started giving people access to this product.
So is that, is that kind of like the gist of the transition?
Jim Belosic (14:53.850)
Exactly, exactly.
Instead of, you know, if we were as the agency, we were a car wash where you park your car, you get out and we wash your car for you and dry it and make it smell nice.
Instead, we said, hey, why don't you just put a quarter in the machine and you can spray the car down yourself, you know, so.
So we just moved to a DIY approach using this in house tool that we had developed.
And, you know, it allowed us to scale very, very rapidly without a whole bunch of additional human hires.
Omer (15:31.470)
So the first version of this product that you made available to your clients, did it allow them to actually build this functionality from scratch, or was it more of like they were still paying you to build these apps and then sort of using this tool as a way to maintain the app?
How did that work?
Jim Belosic (15:49.550)
Yeah, in the first version, it actually did allow them to create things from scratch.
You know, we, again, using the building block, building block concept, you know, we call them widgets, we said, okay, we're going to allow people to add a photo using a photo widget, and they can add, you know, maybe some text using a text widget, and they can have a, you know, form that they can create if they want to collect email addresses using this widget.
So they could stitch it all together and do it themselves, you know, 100%.
We, we still had to bridge a lot of gaps, especially with like our, our brand clients and larger agencies where they wanted some custom functionality and we didn't have, you know, those particular features in the first version.
So, you know, there was a lot of, you know, going back and forth where it wasn't completely diy.
But again, those, you know, those, those requests and those feature requests helped us continue to add features and benefits to our platform.
Omer (16:58.120)
Did you start charging for the product right away when you gave it to clients?
Jim Belosic (17:02.200)
No, it was free in a beta period.
Well, actually, we still have a free version.
We've always kind of gone on the freemium model, which helps give us a lot of exposure to the platform.
But we had a relatively closed beta from November to, you know, November 2010 to January 2011.
So pretty short.
But we just said, hey, let's let, you know, let's invite everyone we know to try this thing out.
We're going to beat it up and look for bugs and listen to our clients.
And then January, I think it was January 5, 2011, we got our first, first paid signup.
And that was definitely a champagne moment.
Omer (17:47.310)
Okay, let's talk about that.
So you, what happened?
How did you.
So then the closed beta, you're not charging.
And at the end of that, what happened?
You, you, you said, okay, if you want to continue to use the product, you're going to have to pay for it?
Jim Belosic (18:03.070)
Not actually, no.
We.
A lot of people, you know, we believe in grandfathering because you're building a relationship.
So if those people were free during the beta, we said, hey, you can go free for as long as you want.
The way to encourage them to upgrade was by continually adding features or more robust aspects to other tiers or something and say, hey, you're on the free version, but if you want this really cool thing that we just came up with, maybe you can give us a few bucks.
So we still have people from way back when who are using the product every day and it's free for them and they're happy with it.
But a lot of them, the majority, ended up upgrading over the next month to six months.
Omer (18:52.910)
How did that first customer find you?
Jim Belosic (18:56.270)
I have no idea.
I think it was referral because we were lucky enough to have some really passionate customers in the beta period where this was something that they had been looking for.
And we built it basically to their spec.
And since we didn't have a lot of clientele, we had, I don't know, maybe 100 people on the beta.
If they asked for a change, we could usually make it within a number of hours.
And they were so excited, I think they ended up telling their friends and blogging about us.
So within the first couple weeks of us actually being able to take signups, we were getting between one and five signups a day, which was great for basically zero marketing and advertising.
Omer (19:53.860)
Wow.
So what kind of advertising or marketing were you doing?
Was it all referrals and word of mouth?
Jim Belosic (20:00.820)
Yeah, yeah, we.
I think I was so focused on the product that I didn't have a whole lot of time to.
To think about the marketing or advertising, you know, and we had no money at the time.
I mean, we were bootstrapping this using our existing agency clientele and, you know, we're very, very cash poor.
I actually stopped making my house payments in order to pay payroll during that time and ended up.
Ended up losing my house because of it.
But it was a, it was a gamble.
My wife wasn't super happy about that, but, you know, I didn't have a whole lot of money to, to go out and say, hey, you know, I want to spend ten grand on, on pay per click ads or whatever.
So instead we just took a lot of effort and sweat equity and put it into the product in the hopes that it would get referred to.
Omer (20:54.560)
Now, when I was doing research for this interview, I came across that story of how you, you know, you'd made the decision to meet your payroll and not meet your own mortgage payments.
And, you know, I want to talk a little bit about, like, why you did that, but in many ways, just hearing that story just told me a lot about the kind of person that you are.
And I'm sure that your employees also probably have a lot of loyalty towards you because of you doing that.
And I'm sure there are lots of other examples.
But just tell me a little bit about what was going through your head when you made that decision.
Jim Belosic (21:37.780)
You know, I had confidence.
If anything, I'm overly confident or overly optimistic when it comes to, you know, things that I get excited about.
So I, I saw the glimmer of, of potential in this product and I had got feedback from, you know, beta clients and, and our previous clients who were using it.
And I knew that there was something here.
I just needed a little more time.
You know, I needed, you know, I needed just a little bit of breathing room before the income started coming in.
We were getting a few dollars here and there, but it wasn't enough to hit payroll yet.
So we were still trying to service our agency clients, doing traditional marketing and whatever.
But some of those, we couldn't take on as many as we needed because we had devoted so many staff resources to the software.
So, you know, looking back at it, and from what I know now, the easy answer is, well, you know, why didn't you take funding or why didn't you go get a, you know, find a VC or an angel or something like that?
That world is just very foreign to me.
I've always known bootstrapping as, you know, I didn't even know it was called bootstrapping.
I just thought it was called running a business where you do a good job, if you make some profit, you reinvest that profit into the business and make it better.
You know, when, when I hear about these companies getting millions and millions or billions of dollars, but then there's some kind of quote, it says, you know, and they're not, they're not revenue positive yet.
I'm going, how can they get so much money when they don't make any money?
And I guess they're just hoping that they'll be sold again.
And someone else will make money.
I don't really know how that works.
So I just did what I knew, which is, you know, use my own resources.
And unfortunately, you know, I thought that I could do it for long enough where I could, I could make some back payments to the house and get it back, but it was too late by that time.
So we ended up renting for a while and we were able to buy a house again a little later down the road.
So it was an adventure.
Omer (24:06.530)
So, okay, let me get this straight.
So you had an agency and a clientele that was generating revenue for you, and you were using that to fund the software business, which would ultimately allow your clients to be able to do the work you were doing from the agency by themselves, which would effectively kill your agency business.
Jim Belosic (24:32.230)
Exactly, exactly.
Omer (24:34.790)
And how much revenue were you generating at the time from the software business?
Jim Belosic (24:40.470)
Not nearly enough.
I mean, maybe 1% of what the agency was doing from day one.
And then what happened is after we continually had referrals, we started getting some good PR from our service.
We started being mentioned in reviews and we started being talked about as far as, hey, look at all this cool stuff that you can do on Facebook and the web and here's three great companies that can do it.
When we were mentioned in those type of things, it really took off.
So within about, I think about eight months, the revenue from the software company had eclipsed what we were making at the agency.
And at that time, we started firing our old agency clients or referring them to other people and shutting down the agency to focus solely on the software company.
Omer (25:39.330)
Wow.
But, but before that happened, you were taking a big bet, right?
I mean, this was, this was a big gamble and you were taking towards the future of the software business.
Jim Belosic (25:52.100)
Yeah, yeah, it was a big gamble.
But the rewards that I saw were not necessarily monetary.
They were scale and I guess freedom of lifestyle.
So my father was an architect and he was just, he worked by himself, had a little office, and he did that every day of his life until he retired.
And I thought that that was really cool.
Every once in a while he could take a two week vacation and the family would go somewhere, but Otherwise he worked 50 or 60 hours or 70 hours a week.
And that's what I thought I was going to emulate.
So that's what I did in my graphic design business and my agency business.
And I just worked and worked and worked.
And then I realized, oh man, I can never leave.
If I take a vacation, all my clients are going to freak out.
My wife and My young family are not happy with me because I'm never home.
I have to do something to get out of this.
So when I saw that the software had the potential to scale and be self service where, you know, I could step out of the office for a couple days and no one would really know, I thought, oh, that's the ticket.
You know, I have to be able to set something up so that my kids, you know, know what I look like when I come home.
And that's, I think that's kind of the main reason why I risked everything.
Omer (27:29.330)
Wow.
Yeah.
I used to work with a guy who used to do incredibly long hours and it was one point in his life when he came home and, and one of his kids who were pretty young asked him, said, daddy, where do you live?
And that for him was just like the changing moment where he was like, you know, I can't keep doing what I'm doing.
You know, when I hear your story and sort of you making the transition from this agency into the software business, you were clearly motivated.
Right.
There were reasons that you saw that the software business being a better future for you and your business.
But you took a big bet.
And I think this is a great example of the quote you gave me earlier.
Right.
You know, first you jump off the cliff and then you build your wings on the way down.
If it sounds like that's exactly what you were doing with this.
Jim Belosic (28:19.520)
Yeah, I mean, I guess I'm a risk taker and I am optimistic, but I'm also very lazy and I only do things on deadlines.
When I was little, I would do all of my homework on Sunday night at midnight for Monday morning.
I'm such a procrastinator and when I decide to do something, I do it best when I have no opportunity to procrastinate.
So building your wings on the way down forces you to succeed or die.
And it's enjoyable when you're confident and when you know that you have a great team who can help you.
If there are mistakes on the way down, then there's really.
It's not as risky as you would think.
You can always see that something's not working and change and adapt.
And I know that as long as we continue to do that, we'll be successful.
I mean, the landscape out there is always changing and in marketing and social media and the web, it's the wild, wild west.
So we're excited and again, confident because I have super smart people.
One of my quotes is hire people smarter than you.
And we've continued to do that.
So the future is really exciting for us.
Omer (29:52.190)
Looking back at those early days, what do you think is one of the biggest mistakes that you made?
Jim Belosic (29:57.670)
I guess not growing fast enough, which sounds weird.
I was nervous in some aspects, but confident in others, and I probably should have had that confidence everywhere.
So what I mean is, in the early days we had like, we knew, okay, we have to hire for this position and by doing so we're going to make three times whatever that person's salary is.
You know, we just, we knew that equation.
If we have another engineer, we can do this many more hours and we'll have this many features and it'll result in this revenue.
But I've always been hesitant about hiring people because if I have to hire them and something unexpected comes up and I have to fire them, that's messing with someone's life.
I'm messing with their family, with their income, with them being able to put a roof over their head.
So I think I should have scaled with people sooner and that would have helped us kind of leapfrog a couple steps a lot quicker.
But you know, I learned from it and today, you know, I operate differently because of that.
Omer (31:18.530)
So you, a little earlier we talked about how, you know, after a period of about eight months, things really started to take off and, you know, you guys were getting some traction.
What, what happened then?
Did you find that you were just, you know, this was just, the marketing machine was just working by itself or were you guys having to go in and figure out how to attract and acquire more customers?
Jim Belosic (31:48.030)
The main thing that we did and we continue to do is listen to the customers that we have.
Because when we were acting as an agency, we were on the front lines with our customers and we were doing a ton of research and watching these campaigns that were our babies, watching them grow and develop along with our clients.
And when you switch that into a self service tool, you don't always see as much of the picture as you normally would.
Some people come in and they build something and run it, they know the results, they look at it, they have opinions, but then we're not always privy to that.
So the customers that do give us feedback, we have to listen to and we rely on them 100% to tell us what's going on out there, what's going on on the front lines.
Do they need a feature?
Do we need to adjust something?
And that's really the best thing that we could ever hope to do is just listen to our clients because they're the ones using it.
You know, we call it the Hippo rule, which is, you know, highest paid person's opinion.
And Sometimes, you know, CEOs or chief engineers or whatever will say, well, I think we need this feature because it's great.
Well, did the customers request it?
No.
Well, then we're not doing it because they are the ones who are smart.
So you got to take some ego out of the equation.
You got to be humble and kind of let them steer the ship.
So we've always done that.
It's helped out with our customer acquisition.
Again, word of mouth, you know, is great.
We did experiment with, you know, Google AdWords and stuff like that.
Our account was actually shut down.
They, they thought that we were selling Facebook likes or something, and they kept shutting down our account.
So we said, okay, screw it, we're not doing AdWords anymore.
And, you know, coming from an advertising background, we tried a bunch of stuff, but really the thing that kept working was just focusing on the product, producing a good product, and then letting our customers kind of do the marketing for us.
Omer (34:12.120)
That's, that's pretty inspiring.
You know, I often hear, you know, people in funded startups who maybe have, you know, they have investors, they have money, and they, they seem, you know, they can say, hey, you know, we're going to focus on building a great product.
Because in many ways there isn't really that sense of urgency to go and generate that revenue quickly.
Maybe there's, you know, maybe they have a different exit strategy in mind.
But when you're bootstrapped, I mean, you've, you've got to pay the bills every month, right?
And to be able to just say, we're going to focus on building a great product and that's going to help us generate the revenue we need is pretty inspiring.
At what point did you start generating enough or more revenue from the software business than you were bringing in from the agency?
Jim Belosic (35:10.630)
Somewhere towards the end of 2011, it started to exceed what we were making from the agency.
And we started firing our old clients, or not really firing, but referring them to other associates that we knew here in town.
And it was refreshing for everyone.
Our staff, that was agency staff, got to work on a new project, which was the software company.
We got to kind of double down on our efforts and refocus and say, okay, we're really in this now.
It's making us a little bit of money.
So now let's take everything we got and try and double it again.
So it was pretty quick within that eight months to a year.
Omer (36:09.790)
And then did you Shut down the agency business.
Jim Belosic (36:12.760)
Yes, we did.
We stopped taking clients, moved existing clients over to partners that we respected, and that's when we reincorporated into a different entity in the eyes of the government and got a new tax ID and everything.
So we kind of started out fresh.
At that point, it was like we were a real startup.
Omer (36:40.410)
Okay, Jim.
So we started this journey by going back to where the idea for Shortstack came from.
And then we've taken this journey together on how you turn that idea into a successful product.
Let's talk about the business today.
What sort of revenue are you guys doing?
Jim Belosic (36:56.970)
We don't disclose exact numbers, but we are well into seven figures and rapidly approaching eight.
And that's with a staff of I think, 20 people now.
Omer (37:15.200)
And how many users do you have?
Or let's, let's tell me about how many users and then maybe give me a sense of how many paying customers you have.
Jim Belosic (37:24.960)
Sure.
You know, I think our paid versus free users fits.
You know, all the other research that I've done where it's, you know, it's basically one out of ten.
You know, I know that that's similar for mailchimp and, you know, some other freemium software.
So we're probably right in there and we have, I don't know, 350,000 users which, who we consider active, you know, where they, where they actually log in and make adjustments and everything.
So, you know, very, very exciting.
It was, it was really nice to go from, you know, 10 or 15 agency clients to 10,000 and then 100,000 and whatever.
And it just proves that software has the ability to scale so much better than, you know, as a self service product than as something that needs a lot of hand holding.
You know, we don't have a staff of, you know, 60 account execs or, you know, 500 customer service people or whatever making calls.
We just make sure the platform is as good as it possibly can be.
Omer (38:36.970)
One thing I'm curious about is earlier you told me that your customers range from small business owners to agencies to brands.
And when most people are starting out a business, you know, the advice you often hear is niche down, right?
I mean, focus on a specific segment and then sort of build up from there.
Did you guys ever do that?
And if not, then, then what sort of challenges have you had to deal with by, you know, the needs of a small business owner compared to a brand are very different?
Jim Belosic (39:14.150)
Oh yeah, 100%.
And you know, I guess, you know, niche down or whatever.
I guess that makes a lot of sense.
I wish I would have known that when we started, what we actually did is just did what we knew we were an agency.
So we built things that we thought agencies would like.
So I guess that was our first focus.
But then we realized that a lot of, you know, mom and pop shops and, you know, one owner startups, one man shows were using our product and not as an agency would, but still using the same tools.
We thought, oh, okay, if we continue to have this target of who our best client is, we'll hit them.
But we're always going to have some sort of scatter, we're going to have other people who use it too.
So by focusing on power users who would be agencies, it gives us a really robust tool set and group of features where the small business guys or the one guy at his kitchen table, he may only use 10% of our product, but it still works for him.
So on the other end of the spectrum is the brands where they're not used to doing anything themselves.
They just want us to go through a bunch of legal documentation, sign SLAs and then we create everything for them.
And that's been really interesting because they have money, they want to give you money.
But I look at it and go, I can't scale by dedicating people just to you and your project.
So here's the tool, go ahead and use it yourself.
And they go, well, yeah, it's great, but we just want you guys to do it.
So it's funny to say no to them because they're not used to people saying no either.
You know, they're like, well, I'm a Fortune 500, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
And we go, I know, but go ahead and use our product, it's probably going to cost you 99 bucks and you guys are going to be stoked.
You know, I, and that's, that's actually one of our current challenges, which is, you know, expanding more into brands and helping them without going full enterprise and maybe neglecting some of our small business clients or agencies.
Brands tend to step into the room and take a lot of air out of the room.
So I want them to still be able to use our product and be happy with it, but at the same time not distract us from what we really enjoy doing, which is helping thousands and thousands of small businesses and agencies get the job done.
Omer (42:12.220)
So are you actually doing this kind of custom work for them, setting things up, or are you just pushing back and trying to get them to use the product?
Jim Belosic (42:20.460)
It's a combination.
We have limited resources in order to do the custom stuff.
Usually what we end up doing is saying, well, here's how we would do it, here's some advice.
We consult with them, we give them everything that we can to help them do it.
And usually once they do and they see, then they're fine from there on out.
But we are kind of running the numbers and looking at, okay, if we had a staff just dedicated to servicing these guys, what would the potential revenue be and the profit?
And it looks good, but it's just not as exciting as putting an engineer on the overall platform.
By him adding one feature, he can be happy or he can make hundreds of thousands of clients happy.
Whereas putting an engineer on one brand's project, it may be used for one brand and then never again.
I just, I'm having this battle with myself of do I kind of want to creep back in and become an agency again?
And I don't know, it's something that we're playing with.
But you know, my heart has always been in the self service realm.
Omer (43:36.390)
Yeah, exactly.
And I think that that was the thought that came to my mind as well, is that the money might be good, but it would kind of potentially suck you back into the agency business.
And there was a reason you moved away from that business in the first place, Right?
Jim Belosic (43:50.700)
Exactly.
Omer (43:51.740)
What's the one thing in your business that you're most excited about right now?
Jim Belosic (43:56.540)
Really?
It's exciting to see kind of the shift in social media we started in Facebook.
Basically that was our bread and butter, is making these apps on Facebook.
And then we're starting to see how social media is still extremely powerful, but it's becoming fragmented.
Facebook is not the end all be all anymore.
We're starting to see Instagram and Pinterest and Twitter and Google and everything else is competing for people's networks.
So for us to reposition ourselves and say, look, let's just focus on your goal.
If your goal is to collect emails, or if your goal is to increase engagement, or if your goal is to get a bunch of people to participate in your promotion, cool, let's focus on that goal.
But then just use it anywhere.
You know, it doesn't have to just be on Facebook.
It can be everywhere.
And that to me is really fun because it helps us, you know, kind of future proof ourselves too.
Where, you know, I'm not going to say that Facebook is like MySpace, but you know, MySpace kind of disappeared all of a sudden.
And by focusing on the goal or the campaign itself, it allows you to use any channel that you want in order to get your message across and, you know, so becoming platform agnostic, I guess, is extremely exciting to us right now.
Omer (45:32.540)
Great.
Okay, Jim, it's now time for our lightning round.
I'm going to ask you a series of questions and I'd like you to answer them as quickly as you can.
Are you ready?
Jim Belosic (45:40.940)
Yeah.
Let's go.
Omer (45:41.900)
Great.
What's the best piece of business advice that you ever received?
Jim Belosic (45:46.940)
Focus on the product.
And that was told to me by Ben Chestnut, co founder of mailchimp.
Omer (45:54.540)
What book would you recommend to our audience and why?
Jim Belosic (45:58.520)
Ah, it's called don't make Me Think and it's by Steve Krug.
It's all about user interface and user experience.
I would encourage everyone to read it because when you realize how convoluted your product can be, it makes sense to you, but to the customer, it might be totally confusing.
This book forces you to put yourself in the customer's shoes and it's really eye opening.
It helps change everything.
I live and breathe by that book.
Omer (46:36.650)
What's one attribute or characteristic in your mind of a successful entrepreneur?
Jim Belosic (46:43.610)
Risk taking.
Omer (46:46.170)
And you do that.
What's your favorite personal productivity tool or habit?
Jim Belosic (46:54.420)
My favorite.
Well, I'm gonna have to say two.
Two favorites.
One is I use a little app called Wunderlist and it's a simple list, just like on paper, where you, you say, you know, pick up the kids, pick up the dry cleaning, and then I get the satisfaction of filling out the little checkbox.
I have to live and die by lists because without it, I have too many things going on.
The second productivity tool is delegation.
Surround yourself with people that you trust and trust them to do their job as good as they possibly can.
And it frees you up to focus on the bigger picture.
Omer (47:38.910)
If you had to start over tomorrow, how would you go about finding that next business opportunity?
Jim Belosic (47:48.760)
You have to look inwards.
You have to look at yourself.
You know, what problems do you have on a day to day?
What kind of things do you see that you think you could make better?
That's where we started where we had this repetitive task.
So we made some software so that we didn't have to do this thing all the time.
You know, I see opportunities constantly.
You know, I tipped over the garbage can on myself the other day taking it out to the street and I go, God, I could design a better garbage can.
You know, so there's not that I'm going to make a lot of money doing that, but there's, there's tons of Opportunities in your everyday life to.
To look for and so do something that you know.
Omer (48:30.860)
What's an interest?
Excuse me?
What's an interesting or fun fact about you that most people don't know?
Jim Belosic (48:40.430)
I am known as the pancake guy around here.
I had a blog called Jim's Pancakes where I made silly 3D pancakes for my daughter.
And the blog kind of took off, and the next thing you know, she and I were on the Rachael Ray show and we wrote a book and all kinds of silly stuff.
Omer (49:01.950)
Wow.
Jim Belosic (49:03.390)
Related to pancakes.
So that's kind of how the name of the company came about, too, because, you know, short stack was kind of my nickname, and we thought it was funny.
It's kind of a big inside joke.
Omer (49:16.320)
I was going to ask you what the thing with pancakes was, so you answered that.
That's great.
And finally, what is one of your most important passions outside of your work, other than pancakes?
Jim Belosic (49:28.720)
Cars.
Has to be cars, actually.
Anything mechanical.
I love, you know, steam trains and cars and bicycles and stuff like that.
I'm not allowed to have motorcycles anymore.
My wife told me I'm worth too much to her alive.
So I love wrenching on cars in the garage and restoring old cars and stuff like that.
Omer (49:53.720)
All right, great answers, Jim.
I want to thank you for joining me today and sharing your experiences and insights with our audience.
And thank you for letting us get to know you a little better than personally as well.
Now, if folks want to find out more about Short Stack or they want to get in touch with you, what's the best way for them to do that?
Jim Belosic (50:13.440)
Sure.
You know, if they want to check out Shortstack, just go to ShortStack.com and you can read all about us and, you know, sign up for a free plan and test it out.
And if you need help, talk to our customer service people.
They're freaking awesome.
I absolutely love my support team.
They're the ones who really make the company run.
So we pride ourselves on customer success, I guess.
And if someone wants to reach out to me, I'm on Twitter.
Not as frequently as I should be, but I'm at Shortstack Gym, of course.
Omer (50:53.320)
All right, great.
Thanks, Jim.
And I wish you continued success.
Jim Belosic (50:57.320)
Thanks, Sommer.
I really appreciate it.
Omer (50:59.000)
Cheers.
