Omer (00:10.080)
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 Sam Dolbell, the co founder and CEO of Sync, a SaaS product that helps companies manage their mobile workforce by taking care of timesheets, location tracking, staff scheduling, and job tracking.
In 2017, Sam was running a small business in New Zealand.
He had 10 employees and found himself spending several hours every week managing payroll.
He reached out to a friend and asked him if he could help him create a spreadsheet that might help him save some time and make dealing with payroll easier.
Sam's friend suggested that they build an app, and that sounded like a great idea.
The only trouble was that his friend, who was a mechanical engineer, didn't know how to code either.
And at that time, his friend was actually filming a documentary in Africa.
But he had some time.
So believe it or not, he started learning to code while living in a tent in Tanzania.
A couple of months later, the app was ready and Sam was using it in his business.
And once they realized the value of the app, they decided to join forces, launch a company, and start selling this as a product.
In this interview, we talk about the lessons Sam and his co founder, whose name is also Sam, learned from starting out with a free product, building a large user base, and then charging.
We also talk about how they developed and refined a freemium pricing model and how and how they figured out which features to build that customers were willing to pay more for.
And we also talk about why they joined an accelerator in Bahrain and eventually relocated their company there.
And surprisingly, how that might actually be a great location for your SaaS business.
Today, Sync has over 1,000 paying customers, and the founder's journey is a really interesting story, so I hope you enjoy it.
Sam, welcome to the show.
Sam Dolbel (02:15.420)
Oh, Omar, pleasure to be here.
Omer (02:17.260)
So do you have a favorite quote?
Something that inspires or motivates you?
Sam Dolbel (02:20.780)
Yeah, look, I'm not a huge quote guy, but there's one thing that stuck with us since we began this journey, and that was Steve Blank's mantra about getting out of the building and talking to customers and the whole customer discovery thing driving product development.
And while most of our users are in the United States, and I can't always be there myself, sometimes I have to do that virtually instead of physically.
It's really driven the product to where it is today.
Omer (02:47.760)
So tell us about sync.
What does the product do, who's it for and what's the main problem that you're helping to solve?
Sam Dolbel (02:57.040)
Well, SYNC is a multi platform SaaS product that helps construction companies gather the critical labor data from the work site and bring it back into the office.
And this data is then used to run payroll very accurately and more importantly, show detailed insight into job profitability at both the project level and also the cost code level.
Now the thing is about construction companies is labor is often the biggest variable in their business.
And we give companies the insight they need to bid competitively and ultimately drive profitability in their business.
Omer (03:31.000)
Got it.
Okay, so let's set the scene here and help just the listeners understand like how your business is set up.
Because it's a pretty unique situation that you have.
You're targeting customers primarily in North America.
You and your co founder are originally from New Zealand.
As you told me earlier, you've kind of been building this business across nine different countries or working from nine different countries.
And now you guys are based in Bahrain.
Sam Dolbel (04:12.120)
That's correct.
So yeah, it's been a bit of a windy journey to get here.
Originally what happened is I was running a company in New Zealand and I had a real problem with payroll.
So, you know, at the point when we decided to do this, I had about 10 employees and we used to pay them weekly.
And I used to spend probably half a day every week messing around with payroll, working out how many hours everyone had worked, making sure that everything was accurate.
You know what it's like for employees.
Everyone's trying to get one up on the boss.
And I actually reached out to my longtime associate Sam Matthews to initially see if he could build me something, try and work together some different systems, maybe something in Excel that could just reduce the amount of time I was spending doing this.
He took a look at it and he said, why don't we build an app?
So basically he taught himself how to do that and within a few months we had a very basic version and we were using it inside the company and we had this really sort of tight feedback loop.
And once we started to see how much value it was bringing us, we decided to turn it into a startup.
Omer (05:22.350)
And so like you said, he taught himself.
So he was a developer, but he learned the kind of the app development piece or he kind of hadn't coded
Sam Dolbel (05:29.870)
before, not at all.
So Sam's actually a mechanical engineer by trade and he's been my sort of right hand man throughout a number of different businesses.
And our whole thing is like, if we see something, we'll just teach ourselves how to do it.
So we taught ourselves SEO through these businesses and how to build websites.
At the time, he was actually filming a documentary in Africa, and he taught himself how to code inside a tent in Tanzania.
Omer (05:55.350)
You're kidding me.
Sam Dolbel (05:56.150)
Funnily enough.
Seriously?
Yeah.
So it's really, really unique story.
He quickly whipped up a very basic chat app, following some tutorials, and he said, oh, this stuff isn't too hard.
So we started having all these grandiose ideas about everything we'd want to throw at this.
Obviously, like, reality kicked in.
After some time, we realized how complicated everything was.
But, you know, we got.
We got the first product out there inside my business, and it was really great because we didn't have any pressure from customers, and we were able to.
We were able to deal with bugs very quickly.
Omer (06:30.850)
So Sync is a mobile app.
So you have an iOS version, an Android version, and then there's a web app as well, and you're doing six figures in ARR.
And how many customers do you have?
Sam Dolbel (06:48.760)
We are knocking on the door of 1,000 paying customers, but we have many more free customers, so there's a free version of the application, and that's been our business model so far.
Omer (06:59.640)
Okay, yeah, I want to talk about that in a little while.
So when did you guys launch this business?
Sam Dolbel (07:05.080)
Well, like I said, about the start of 2017 is when we decided to build it for my own company.
Really turned it into a startup probably about June of 2017 when we released it on the App Store and the Play Store.
And what we did is we just.
We wanted to get as much feedback as possible from people because we had our own ideas and what we'd known from our own businesses, but we wanted to know what everyone wanted in terms of features.
And the idea was if we just made it free, we'd get more users in the door.
And that just worked.
We got one guy downloaded it and then another one, and they started to get so much value from it that they just spread it amongst their friends.
Omer (07:44.580)
So was it a freemium business model or just free?
Sam Dolbel (07:47.600)
That was just straight.
It was free.
There was.
There was.
We didn't get around.
We didn't get around to building a payment system till about June of 2018.
So up until that point, it was just free.
As many users as you had.
And all we expected in return was for you to take a phone call every now and then and talk to us about the product.
Omer (08:08.880)
So was that the main way that you were validating the idea, I mean,
Sam Dolbel (08:15.270)
we'd already validated inside the business and we knew there was a big need for it.
And I had actually been a customer of some of our competitors in my last business.
But what I'd learned from that was there was nothing in the market that really offered very simple to use powerful software.
It was either too simple and didn't have the features you need, or it was just overcomplicated.
And the thing is, with a piece of software like this, yeah, the customers, the business owner or one of the business administrators, but the real users are the employees.
And if you don't get buy in from the employees, the whole thing falls apart.
And I knew from experience, hiring very low level, low skilled employees, that you can implement a system like this and if you have one or two guys who don't quite get how to use it and don't do it properly, the whole thing sort of falls apart.
Omer (09:04.730)
Okay, got it.
So making the product available for free was a great way to spread the word, find users, get feedback, further validate the idea.
But it also turned out to be something that caused you some problems later on.
Sam Dolbel (09:30.410)
I wouldn't say problems, I mean, the free users did us a lot of favors.
It helped us gain some traction inside the app stores with the usage velocity.
But what we found is that we just started to really over optimize for free users with the idea that eventually they'll become bigger or they'll see the value and additional features and upgrade.
But we just found like after a while that if someone comes in, uses something like this for free, they really just expect to continue to use it for free.
So that was the problem we had.
And the other thing about gathering too much customer feedback from people who do not expect to pay for the product, you're optimizing for the wrong sort of customer.
So we didn't make any really bad development decisions, but we had to filter out a lot of feature requests that weren't really going to help us in the long run.
So once we started getting paying customers, that's when we started to get really useful product information.
Omer (10:28.290)
Okay.
And so you guys focus on the construction industry, but when you made the product, you just put it in the app stores.
Presumably you were getting people from all different kinds of industries using the product.
Sam Dolbel (10:41.880)
Yeah, so yeah.
So the thing is, we always set out like the end goal was always to build something that was the very best in job costing.
So not only knowing how many hours your team is working, but what particular jobs they're working on and what aspects inside those jobs.
So they're known as Costco, but they're essentially jobs within jobs.
So if you look at a construction company, you might have, you know, three or four different jobs on the go.
You might have some guys on one job, but you want to know what job within that job they're doing.
Like they might have spent a lot of time framing.
And you want to be able to spit out those reports at the end of the week and have that visibility.
But to do that, we had to get the time and attendance piece right.
It sounds simple, but it ends up being very complicated to do over multiple devices and time zones.
But we had to get the time and attendance.
But so we were essentially just marketing to general blue collar companies who have an hourly workforce.
And we ended up with probably, if we looked at it today, we probably have about 60% of our user base are construction companies, maybe another 10% are cleaning companies, and the rest are just every vertical that you could imagine.
Because anyone who has an hourly workforce can find value in the time and attendance.
But the thing is about time and attendance also is if you look in the app store, there's a lot of very simple applications that on the surface essentially do the same thing, and that's what affects the willingness to pay.
Omer (12:10.780)
So how do you differentiate yourself if people are.
They have an abundance of choice in an app store and a lot of those products are free.
Sam Dolbel (12:20.700)
Yeah.
So that's a problem.
Well, it's not a problem.
It's something that we were dealing with for the last part of last year.
Building the job costing side of the company is how we differentiate ourselves.
But it turns out that that was more work than everything we'd done up until that point.
So we went through this period in the last six months of last year.
We were just.
The who team was working on job costing and we just got in.
We couldn't really change the messaging because the new features weren't there.
And we just really just sort of dug our heads in and just got the new features out as quick as possible.
And we launched them, I think, on the 24th.
I think we were still launching it on Christmas day.
Like no one had a day off on Christmas Day.
And now we essentially go into market with it.
Omer (13:04.800)
You sound like Scrooge.
Sam Dolbel (13:07.560)
Well, luckily, being in Bahrain, it wasn't so much of a problem for the workforce.
And then we just wanted to start the year basically going to market for the first time with the product that we set out to build two and a half years ago.
Omer (13:21.380)
So when did you start charging for the product.
And tell me about like how you sort of have transitioned from free to paying and what if any, issues that's caused.
Sam Dolbel (13:35.140)
Well, we started off, like I say, about halfway through 2018 and we just, we put a paid tier on for customers who had more than five users.
And even up until now, we're rethinking this at the moment.
But up until the point that we are recording this podcast, we give the product away on a limited capacity to companies who have five users or less.
So the idea initially was these companies will get bigger and become paid, which turns out not to be.
Maybe we're a little bit optimistic on that one.
So all of our paying customers in this industry, they're not high growth companies and most of them don't want to be growth companies.
They're typically very small operators who they might be like a handyman business.
You'll have.
The owner still goes out on the job, they still have the tools.
We have two or three helpers.
It's not the sort of thing that's going to get really large.
And look, some people have, we've had guys who've started off on the free tier and have got 100 employees now, but it's not so common.
Omer (14:36.940)
Okay, that makes sense.
Okay.
So this kind of idea of we're going to have this free plan and these companies and customers are going to grow and then they're going to start paying us didn't sort of pan out as you sort of understood what was going on with what type of customers you had.
So today it's like if you have more than five users or employees, then you're paying to use the product.
Sam Dolbel (15:02.860)
Correct.
You have to pay.
If you have over five users, you have no choice but to pay or at least go on to, to a free trial of one of the paid plans.
Omer (15:10.400)
And tell me a little bit about your pricing.
Like how did you kind of figure out, like if we look at the pricing plan today, it starts from 1499amonth.
That's not per user.
So that's if you've got.
Sam Dolbel (15:27.320)
So that's per company.
So that's up to seven employees.
Omer (15:31.480)
Wow, that's really cheap.
Sam Dolbel (15:32.760)
We're too cheap at the moment.
See, the thing is we had to get the job costing side of things finished and make sure it was stable and people were happy with it.
And the idea is now we will begin to gradually put that price up.
The problem was when we were just a time and attendance application there, you know, there's some, there's some really Great companies out there who are doing it really well, who charge more than us.
But we just felt that like, you know, we weren't there on a feature to feature basis and we just felt a bit uncomfortable charging the same as what a much more established company would.
That was the idea.
But now that we have these features that not a lot of companies do, and in some aspects we are doing better, we can happily put that price up, but we just want to do it.
We just want to do it gradually.
Omer (16:16.370)
How did you figure out what were the most important features that you should build or invest your time and money in?
Was this based on you as the founders and the knowledge of these types of businesses, or were you spending a lot of time and talking to customers and trying to figure out what more they needed?
Sam Dolbel (16:40.450)
So we had our own hypothesis based on the companies that we'd run and we really validated that by spending a lot of time talking to users.
Now during the first 18 months when it was just my business partner and I, he was writing all the code.
So my main job was talking to the customers.
And I will spend up to three or four hours a day just on the phone calling up the users and just talking about what they want and how they're using the product, what they would like to see.
And if we get enough interest in a certain feature, then we will prioritize it.
Omer (17:15.980)
And so what were you hearing about the sort of the.
What was it?
The costing?
Sam Dolbel (17:20.780)
Yeah, the job costing was something that we get asked for multiple times a day and have been for the last sort of 18 months.
It was the by far the highest requested feature.
And in a lot of ways it was, it was the difference between using us or not.
Like we'd have people come in and they'd love the product, but they'd say we need to do job costing and we just couldn't help them, so they would leave.
But it was by far the most requested and I had a lot of insight into that from my previous business.
I had this exact same problem because to do proper job costing, you almost need a full time person doing it.
You almost need a full time admin person associating those hours to specific jobs.
And not, not every small business could afford something like that, but essentially everyone needs it because in these industries, like how these companies grow is they just take on as many jobs as they possibly can and essentially work out how to do them when they roll around.
And in these blue collar industries, mostly in the construction field, how you solve a lot of these problems when you Take on too much work is throwing extra labor at it and it can really get out of hand because in the moment you're just trying to keep the customers happy and do a great job.
But at the end of the, or at the end of the quarter and you're wondering, you know, where all the profit went.
You wish that you had been accurately costing those jobs and working out where that labor component was going.
Omer (18:42.600)
Okay, so tell me about, like, what have you done to like, how did you go from zero to close to a thousand customers?
Like, what's been the main driver?
Sam Dolbel (18:55.320)
Well, what people like about it is it's complicated software done in a very intuitive, easy to use way.
And that, as you know, and as your listeners will know, is actually a really hard thing to get right.
We've just been very focused on making sure that, you know, any level of employee could pick up the application and just intuitively know how to use it.
We have very little onboarding.
I mean, there's obviously a whole range of support documentation, but, you know, most people would just be able to pick it up and use it.
We just don't want to make the software too complicated.
And that's the number one bit of feedback that we get from our customers.
And the other thing is that we've got a real passion for making very transparent fear software for employees.
Because the thing is, when you start getting into these sort of things, there's a lot of stuff out there that can make it very easy for sort of bad actor employees to manipulate staff hours without them knowing.
When everything lives in the cloud and no one has visibility into their hours, and no one knows whether the boss has trimmed a few hours off your paycheck every week.
So we make sure that every change in the system is communicated to both parties, which we get a lot of pushback from customers on.
But those aren't the sort of customers that we want.
Omer (20:13.460)
So if I'm an employer and I'm using the app and I kind of look at the hours that my employees have worked and for whatever reason I decide I'm going to change that number, they get notified, correct?
Sam Dolbel (20:27.430)
Any edit is notified.
And the other thing is that it's a really touchy subject of employees is the whole privacy thing.
Because we track locations.
Now, some applications will force employees to have location permissions switched on before they can clock in for work.
That's something that we fundamentally disagree with and it's something that we haven't done.
We leave the location tracking aspect of sync as turned off by default for everyone.
And they have to turn it on for it to start working.
Omer (20:55.930)
Okay, but like, where did these customers come from?
Was this basically, you know, you marketing to the free users you already had and finding customers there, or were you doing different types of outreach or marketing to find paying customers?
Sam Dolbel (21:14.250)
No, it was purely, like, in the beginning, it was purely companies that were over five and over five users.
There was.
There were no additional features.
The only difference between being free and being paid was having over five users.
Omer (21:25.730)
Okay, and so once you added the ability to pay for the product a year later, what did you do?
You just sent an email out to your users to let them know that
Sam Dolbel (21:37.970)
we didn't even do that.
We just turned it on and we got our first paying customer.
We were very happy, and we just had a steady trickle since then.
We've only just started marketing to our free user base on the second week of February.
We wanted to wait till everyone was back after Christmas.
So we've really just been focused solely on building a great product and not so much on the growth side.
And that's essentially changed about a month ago.
Omer (22:04.750)
Okay, so you started out as a free product, completely free.
There wasn't even a way to pay.
Then you added the payment component to that, and it effectively became a freemium business model.
And the growth that we're talking about here, close to a thousand customers, has all been organic through people finding the product through one of the app stores or potentially Google, and then some of them signing up for a paid plan.
Sam Dolbel (22:33.280)
Yeah, I couldn't tell you exactly how many people come in through the app stores, but a great deal of them is just really organic word of mouth.
We don't have any official referral system inside of the product, but people just.
We get comments, and you can read all the.
All the reviews on the Play Store, but, you know, like, in the early days, we were getting comments like, where has this been my whole life?
It's just saved me so much time, so much money.
And they just naturally tell their other friends who are running small businesses.
I believe that's been our biggest driver.
Omer (23:00.700)
So tell me a little bit about talking to customers three, four hours a day.
I don't hear many people doing that.
And also, I'm curious, how do you set up the conversation with customers?
Like, a lot of the times when you use a product and you have somebody contacting you or wanting to get you on the phone, it's usually because they want to figure out how they can upsell you something else.
Sam Dolbel (23:31.820)
Sure, I know what you mean.
The thing is I love small businesses.
I love talking about it.
I love hearing about how businesses are going.
So I'll typically start with, you know, they might start with a support request and I may, sometimes I'll jump on the live chat and if I see an interesting support request, then I'll ask them if they have, if they have time for a quick chat and I'll just talk about how they're using the product.
Obviously we'd love to get them on the paid tiers and quite often we manage to do that on the phone call, but it's certainly not the reason for the call.
And I think I make that pretty clear at the beginning of the conversation.
So people feel a bit more comfortable and they really appreciate it as well.
Omer (24:14.010)
So are you reaching out to people who are just used on the free plan or are you also having these conversations with people who are already customers and paying for the product?
Sam Dolbel (24:22.250)
Both.
Both.
We get more valuable insight out of paying customers.
So we're really interested.
Like if I see a company who's got, you know, they've got 30 employees and they're heavily using the product, I really want to find out what they like about it, what they'd like to see improved.
And we will put a lot of weight into those sort of phone calls in terms of what build next and how we prioritize things.
Because they're our ideal customer.
Omer (24:45.750)
Yeah.
And presumably if someone's paying for the product, they're more engaged, they're clearly getting some value from it.
And I think for most cases, I think if a paying customer is giving you feedback that has more weighting than somebody who's using the product for free.
Sam Dolbel (25:04.070)
Yes.
Omer (25:04.550)
It's interesting.
A lot of the times the ones, the people who are using the product for free seem to be the most vocal about all the things they need.
Sam Dolbel (25:11.970)
They certainly have the most support requests.
I can tell you that quite often it's the guys who are paying us the most that you never hear from.
Omer (25:20.210)
Yeah, I can see that.
Have you ever thought about not having a free plan, like moving away from the freemium model and maybe just giving people a trial and then after that they have to sign up and pay.
Sam Dolbel (25:34.530)
That is the direction that we are now going in because we're now targeting construction companies and not large construction companies, but not two or three person operations.
And we give so much value that it's more than fair to pay and we can charge a lot more than what we're charging at the moment.
So the way we look at it is we've just Been in product mode for all this time.
Now we're in growth mode and we are targeting a different sort of customer and we will gradually move away from the free version and maybe just try to put people into a free trial.
Omer (26:09.050)
Yeah, you know, I think a good lesson here for people listening who maybe are starting out, who are trying to figure out their pricing, is that don't overthink it too much when you start out, because your pricing on launch is never going to be perfect and it's going to continue to evolve.
And even.
And companies doing hundreds of millions of dollars a year are still continuously testing their pricing and optimizing and figuring out how to kind of reconfigure that.
So in many ways, I think you guys are a good example of that, where it's like, yeah, well, we launched and we didn't worry about pricing because we didn't have any pricing or you couldn't pay for the product.
Sam Dolbel (27:02.180)
Correct.
It's just important, I think, just to charge something.
I don't think it matters what price point is, because as you say, it's going to change as the company evolves.
But just having that validation that people will put in a credit card and they get that much value out of it has got to be worth something in those early days.
Omer (27:18.240)
Yeah, I agree with you.
I think that's in many ways is the key is like, rather than trying to figure out what is my perfect pricing, figure out, is there a reasonable number that you could ask people to pay?
And generally I say it's like, hey, whatever your price is, are you able to either demonstrate or kind of feel good that, you know, the value that you're delivering your customers from that price is, you know, 3x5x, whatever they're paying.
And that's probably a good enough place to start your pricing and get out there.
So let's talk about Bahrain.
How did you guys end up there?
And why have you decided to you set up that country as a base for your SaaS business when all your customers are in North America?
Sam Dolbel (28:08.880)
It's a funny story.
So when it was just Sam and I working on this and we were doing it remotely all around the world, it's quite a lonely thing to do.
And we sort of got fixated on the idea that we needed to join an accelerator.
And we were both in Hong Kong at the time, and we went to a expo there and we had a booth and we essentially wrote on our sign that we were looking for an accelerator.
And.
And from that we ended up meeting.
We ended up Meeting a few that were interested in us.
But we came across a booth for startup Bahrain and neither of us could pinpoint Bahrain on the map.
And it just seemed like such a crazy place to base a software company that's targeting the us.
But when we started to look into it, there were all these government subsidies available to help small businesses here.
And.
And we were very quickly put on to a government agency here called TAM Keen.
It's essentially the labor fund and they will subsidize 50% of the salaries of your local employees and all sorts of other things.
Like we ended up setting everyone up with fully spec'd IMAX and they picked up half the price of the purchase costs.
And what that enabled us to do in those early days when we had very little MRR and some very modest funding was just do a lot with a small amount of money and just be really scrappy.
So we got put in touch with an accelerator here called flatsix Labs, who is an experienced accelerator operating all over the MENA region.
And they are actually funded by that same program, Tam Keen.
And they made a moderate investment in us for an equity position and put us through their program.
And through that program we ended up raising a pre seed financing round of around 300,000 through some very good investors called the Dubai Angel Network over there in Dubai.
So it ended up being really, really worthwhile.
And we love being here.
The downside is the time zone difference.
So I work very funny hours.
We essentially start work at about one in the afternoon and work until the early hours of the morning.
But it's quite good because we do spend a lot of time in the States, so we're accustomed to the time zone and there's no jet lag going between the two regions.
Omer (30:34.550)
So you get some financial incentives from the government there if you're hiring local people.
What's the talent market like out there and how easy or hard has it been to find the kinds of people you need?
Sam Dolbel (30:48.950)
We haven't had any trouble.
I mean, we've found five very good team members here.
But what we did is we pay a little bit more than what most technology companies would here.
And the fact that we're working with technology, that's really exciting to these guys.
They're very happy to do it.
So we sort of get the pick of the bunch.
I don't know if you'd be able to scale a very large development team here and we wouldn't want to.
Like our plan is to have distributed teams.
We'd probably bring this team up to maybe Eight or nine people.
And that would be about all that we would want here.
Omer (31:23.740)
Okay.
And so in terms of setup, you're set up as a Delaware C corp.
Does it complicate things by having that set up, being in Bahrain, having customers in America?
Has there been any kind of challenges with that kind of setup or is it easier than it sounds?
Sam Dolbel (31:41.100)
It sounds so complicated, but we've just done it.
I mean, we had to set up another company here in the kingdom to access these benefits.
And it's a little bit of a complicated process to do that.
But we haven't found any complications.
I mean, we set up the Delaware company with clerky and that was reasonably easy.
Our investors invest into that company.
We don't have any trouble sort of visa wise in the U.S. yeah, it sounds very complicated and messy, but it really hasn't been.
Omer (32:11.210)
So you were able to raise some funding to help with the business and I know you used most or a big chunk of that money to hire developers.
Talk us through that a little bit because I think there's an interesting lesson there about hiring and pace of hiring and kind of what you guys have learned from your experience.
Sam Dolbel (32:36.770)
Yeah, so we were a little naive in the sense like we were staring down the barrel of 40 plus feature requests that people were requesting quite often and, and initially we just thought that we need to throw more developers at it.
So we quickly hired four or five developers right off the bat.
And my co founder Sam, who can essentially just code as fast as he can type, was getting things out the door really quickly.
But when he had to move to that sort of managerial role, his output was just reduced so drastically.
And our conversations went from purely discussing products to discussing HR issues and dealing with paperwork.
And in hindsight we probably would have done that a little slower and would have probably got more output in that time frame.
But I mean we're in a good position now because we have a fully trained team who can all work independently.
But there was certainly a period last year where we felt like we were working a lot harder than we were before and producing a lot less in terms of product development.
Omer (33:43.940)
Yeah, that's a great lesson there.
And just hiring more people quickly doesn't always equate to innovating and shipping more features faster.
And as you guys have learned, it can actually slow you down.
So be careful what you wish for.
Sam Dolbel (34:03.360)
It would have come from my experience running these blue collar businesses because in a company like that you can really just throw more people at it.
But it's just doing what we're doing now is just so much more complex, but it's all worked out quite well and now we have, like I say, we've got this fully trained team and we are pumping out features very quickly.
Omer (34:24.219)
Good stuff.
Okay, we should wrap up and get onto the lightning round.
So you're a listener to the show anyway, so you know the drill.
I'm not going to explain it to you.
Are you ready to go?
Sam Dolbel (34:37.099)
Yep.
Omer (34:37.979)
What's the best piece of business advice you've ever received?
Sam Dolbel (34:41.339)
The best growth hack is just building a more compelling product.
Omer (34:45.940)
What book would you recommend to our audience and why?
Sam Dolbel (34:48.980)
Well, I've taken all my book recommendations from your show, so I'm going to go in a little different direction here and recommend a book called Liver Rescue by a guy who calls himself the medical medium.
Now, I was facing a problem when we started doing this business of essentially brain fog and I thought it was a stress thing, but once I started a daily routine of drinking celery juice, it cleared that all up and I couldn't recommend that book enough for productivity.
Omer (35:19.280)
Liver Rescue by the medical medium.
Sam Dolbel (35:21.640)
Liver Rescue.
And if I could give your listeners two tips, it would be get used to drinking celery juice first thing in the morning and drink what he calls a heavy metal detox smoothie.
It's just done wonders for the mental well being.
Omer (35:36.320)
I hate celery, but maybe I need to have an open mind.
Sam Dolbel (35:39.680)
The trick is to hold your breath and just get it down as quick as possible.
Omer (35:44.640)
What's one attribute or characteristic in your mind of a successful founder?
Sam Dolbel (35:49.200)
In our case, it's pride.
If failure is not an option, you're going to weather the storm a lot better.
Omer (35:54.320)
What's your favorite personal productivity tool or habit?
Sam Dolbel (35:57.280)
Dot journaling.
So I keep a journal and that's how I find I get more tasks done throughout the day.
Omer (36:02.160)
What's that called?
Sam Dolbel (36:03.680)
Dot journaling.
Some people call it bullet journaling.
It's just a system of running a journal and I found it quite rewarding.
Omer (36:12.160)
Oh, and this is just paper based?
Sam Dolbel (36:14.080)
Yeah, just a paper journal.
And it just really helps getting tasks done throughout the day.
Omer (36:19.360)
What's a new or crazy business idea you'd love to pursue if you had the extra time?
Sam Dolbel (36:23.120)
I wouldn't allow myself to think of it, but if it was something, it would be in the blue collar small business space.
Omer (36:29.280)
What's an interesting or fun fact about you that most people don't know?
Sam Dolbel (36:32.480)
Well, I've never had a boss.
I've essentially never had a job.
I've always worked for myself.
Omer (36:38.040)
And finally, what is one of your most important passions outside of your work?
Sam Dolbel (36:41.560)
That it has to be my family.
I have a wife who is a travel and lifestyle blogger, so I spend most of my free time taking photos of her.
And I have a three year old son who's obsessed with me and that takes up all my spare time.
Omer (36:56.200)
Cool.
And if people want to find out more about sync, they can go to Sync, which is S I N C. That was interesting.
Like, you don't have a.com domain.
Right.
It's just all.business right now.
Sam Dolbel (37:10.840)
Yeah, we just went with business and you know, it's worked for us.
Omer (37:15.000)
And if people want to get in touch with you, what's the best way for them to do that?
Sam Dolbel (37:18.680)
LinkedIn.
Send me a request on LinkedIn.
I accept just about everyone.
Omer (37:22.840)
Okay.
We'll put a link in the show, notes to that as well.
Great.
Well, Sam, thank you for joining me and sharing your story and the lessons that you guys have learned over the last couple of years.
I know it's probably coming to what, it's around, what, 11pm for you in Bahrain.
Sam Dolbel (37:41.010)
It is, yeah.
Yes.
Omer (37:42.450)
So I appreciate you staying up and I wish you and Sam all the best of success.
Sam Dolbel (37:48.370)
Yeah.
Thank you.
It's been a real pleasure and thank you so much for having me on.
Omer (37:51.570)
All the best.
Cheers.
Sam Dolbel (37:52.610)
Thanks.
Bye.
Bye.
