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 Stu McLaren.
Stu is the founder of Wishlist Member, a powerful and easy to use plugin that can turn any WordPress site into a full blown membership site.
Wishlist member powers over 54,000 online communities and membership sites worldwide.
Stu is also the founder of Rhino Support, a help desk SaaS application.
Sue Stu, welcome to the show.
Stu McLaren (00:54.160)
Thanks, Omer.
Good to be here, buddy.
Omer (00:56.480)
Now, before we talk about your software business, tell us a little bit about yourself.
Who is Stu when he's not working on his business?
Stu McLaren (01:06.960)
I am a guy that leads a very simple life.
So I love simplicity.
And I live in a very small town about an hour and a half south of Toronto with my beautiful wife and lovely little three and a half year old daughter.
I like to keep life simple.
My wife and I have our own charity where we do a lot of, we build schools over in Kenya.
That's a huge part of my life and that's really what motivates me with business.
One of the reasons that I love being an entrepreneur is that we are the ones that are able to make something out of nothing and create value.
We get compensated for that value.
When we get compensated, we can do whatever we want at that point.
It is unbelievably empowering when you can change lives with the business that you create.
That's why I love entrepreneurship.
That's why I love creating software.
That's why I love what I do.
Because the more money I make, the more impact I can have.
That's what really drives me and motivates me.
And that's a little bit about who I am.
As I said, we live a very simple life in a small little town out in the country.
And I love that.
I love keeping life stress free and simple.
Omer (02:27.120)
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 quotes?
Stu McLaren (02:38.160)
I got two for you, Omer.
Is that all right?
Omer (02:40.000)
Wonderful.
Stu McLaren (02:40.800)
Okay, the first one is one that my father told me way back when I was 13 years old and I was a very athletic kid and I had been nominated for athlete of the year my first year in high school and I didn't win and I was severely disappointed about that.
And he shared this quote with Me, he said, faith is to believe in what you do not see.
The reward for that faith is to see what you believe.
And that's by St. Augustine.
And.
And basically he shared it with me because he said, listen, son, like, you've put in all this hard work throughout the year, but you didn't even realize that you would have been in a position to possibly win athlete of the year.
But now you know what you need to do to win it next year.
And he said, you got to have faith in that.
All of the things that you do throughout the year will add up and will create a case for you to win that award.
And it did.
I held onto that belief the entire year afterwards and did whatever I could to ensure that I would win that award.
And I ultimately ended up winning it.
The remaining years that I was in high school as a freshman, not as a freshman, as a junior and senior and so forth.
And so I love that quote because I think in life we put in all of that hard work day in and day out, and we wonder if it's ever going to pay out.
And the key there is to have the faith and to believe in what you do not see.
But the reward for that faith is to see what you believe.
So I love that quote.
Second one I want to share with you is more modern day.
This one is from one of my favorite bands, Mumford and Son.
Mumford and Sons.
And in one of their songs, there's a line where they said, where you invest your love, you invest your life.
And what I love about that quote is that it can be applied to virtually any area of our life.
It can be applied to our health.
It can be applied to our personal lives with relationships.
It can be applied to our business, where you invest your love, meaning where you invest your time, your energy and your effort.
You invest your life.
I think that it's so applicable regardless of what area of your life you may be thinking about.
Those are two of my favorite quotes,
Omer (05:01.930)
and they're both two great quotes.
Thank you for sharing those for sure.
Okay, so let's start by giving the listeners a better understanding of wishlist member.
Who are your target customers and what are the top pain points that you're trying to solve for them?
Stu McLaren (05:19.850)
Our target customers are people who are wanting to sell information or they want to control access to information.
And typically they are teachers, trainers.
It could be clubs or associations.
It could be online instructors.
It could be authors, speakers, anybody who has information that they're trying to share with an audience, but they're trying to control who has access to that information.
And so our target customer, the pain point that we've helped solve for them is that we've made that process pretty easy and pretty inexpensive.
A lot of times people have ideas for membership sites or courses or online communities and they want to explore that, but they're reluctant to invest a whole bunch of money up front because they don't know if the idea is really going to take off.
I think that was the pain point that we were able to really hit, hit precisely with wishlist Member, is that we gave people the opportunity to experiment with those types of ideas inexpensively and risk free.
There was a real need when we launched because there really wasn't anything that was user friendly.
It required a lot of technical setup to be able to create membership sites and to create online courses and so forth.
With wishlist Member, we solved that complexity component by making it easy being a simple WordPress plugin that then gave them many options to be able to grow from there.
Omer (07:00.710)
How did you come up with the idea for this product?
Stu McLaren (07:06.230)
Well, it came out of my own need.
One day I was moaning and groaning to my business partner, Tracy Childers.
I said, you know, man, I really want to create my own membership site because I had a very successful consulting business at the time.
But I realized that with that consulting business, I was limited in the way that I could leverage my time.
The only way I could grow that business was by giving more of my time to more clients.
And I didn't have any more time to give.
So I wanted to find a way that I could leverage what it is that I knew, share it with more people and get compensated for it.
And so I had an idea to create a membership site.
And when I started going down that path, it quickly struck me how complex that process was for getting a simple membership site set up.
And so I was moaning and groaning to Tracy about it.
And he said, well, why don't you just create your own solution?
And I remember responding, saying, dude, listen, I could never do that.
I'm not a programmer, I don't code.
There's no way that I'd be able to do that.
And he said, yeah, but you're a pretty good Photoshop hack.
Why don't you just put together some mockups and let's team up together?
He said, I have a very good software developer that works with me and we could do this as a partnership.
That's exactly what happened.
I went into Photoshop, I did some very basic mockups.
A month later, we had our first Beta version.
And then we sold it to a group of friends.
I didn't give it to friends.
I sold it to them.
There's a reason behind that.
We talked about that, I'm sure.
Then a month after that, we went public with the product.
From there, it just kind of took off.
Word of mouth spread.
That business just grew on its own.
And it was incredible to see where it is today.
Omer (09:01.150)
Okay, so most people would moan and complain about something.
They might come up with an idea for building a software product, and then they just stop there.
Right after they spent that moment talking about that idea, they'd go off back to the reality of whatever they did.
But you went further, right?
You actually went and built the product.
So what happened next?
Stu McLaren (09:33.220)
Well, what happened was the sales of that product took off without very much effort.
I'm a marketing guy, so that's my background.
But the truth of the matter is, when we first got started, we didn't invest a lot in marketing.
What happened was we just hit a real need in the marketplace.
I think one of the key elements to that was that we were scratching our own itch.
So I was the customer in this case.
I had the need, I felt the pain.
I knew exactly how to communicate that to our audience.
But I also from that, knew how I wanted to see the product evolve so that it eliminated that challenge that I experienced beforehand.
I think by being so connected to the problem itself and, and the experience that our market or our audience was having prior to our product, I could speak to their pain points really easily.
And then we also designed the product accordingly.
I think with anything, the more in tune you can get with the customer's real need and the pain and the challenge that they're experiencing.
The better your communication is going to be, the better your marketing is going to be, but most importantly, the better the product is going to be.
So when we developed our next product, which was Rhino Support.
We can talk about that.
That too was built out of the same frustration that we were experiencing in the marketplace.
We wanted a help desk that wouldn't cost us an arm and a leg.
As our company continued to grow, we wanted it to keep it streamlined and pretty straightforward and simple.
The help desk that we were using prior to that, we were getting charged for every new person that we would add to our company to be able to use the help desk.
And it was frustrating as all heck because as my company was growing, so were our support costs.
And they didn't need to be.
We had a need and we created a solution.
And one of the primary things that we focused on when we were developing that was that we wanted to make it so easy that people wouldn't have to refer to any documentation or support videos to be able to get started and to be able to use it.
And I think the key when you're developing any type of software product is to get really dialed into the need of the marketplace.
So that that helps as far as communication, but it also helps when you're designing the product because you want to make it so that people don't have to ask questions in order to get the benefit right out of the gate.
They know the next steps.
They know how to start using the product without having to refer to any support docs or videos.
Omer (12:14.890)
Did you get any feedback from potential customers while you were building that first version of the product?
Stu McLaren (12:26.330)
No.
So I don't know if that's a good thing or a bad thing, but we didn't.
We built it internally based on the mockups and so forth that I had created.
And afterwards, certainly we got tons of feedback from our customers that we're buying and so forth.
But I think with anything, you got to be careful with feedback.
You've got to really be intentional about being a filter, because everybody and their mother are going to have different feature requests.
Those feature requests are going to be specific to their particular needs.
But you've got to take a step back when you're the owner of a software company and.
And you've got to look at the features as they relate to everyone's needs.
We had to learn that the hard way in the first few months when we launched this publicly and we were having hundreds of people buying it right out of the gate and everybody sending us different feature requests.
It got overwhelming.
But we learned pretty quickly that we basically put every feature request into a list.
And then we would ask ourselves, will this benefit the vast majority of people who buy and use this product?
And if the answer was no, then we would save those ideas for potential spinoffs or additional plugins that would tie into wishlist member.
But if the answer was yes, then we'd put it in.
We'd seriously consider it as a feature that would get added to the main product.
Omer (13:56.700)
So most people.
Let's talk about most software entrepreneurs have probably been through an experience where they build a piece of software, get it out to market, and then realize that nobody wants it, right?
I mean, they can't give this thing away for free.
And they're going to listen to this and say, wow, you know, this sounds too easy, right?
You came up with this idea, you know, within a month or so you had this first version built, you got it out and immediately you started paying for it and things took off.
So one part of that you touched on was really about get understanding the pain.
And in this, this particular case, you were scratching your own itch, right?
And so I think you understood those pains deeply.
But what else do you think you did to help you guys be successful when you got this thing out of the gate?
Stu McLaren (15:00.280)
Well, the let's.
One thing to understand was that I was okay either way if this did take off and also if it didn't take off.
So the benefit to that was that initially when we first created it, because I was scratching my own niche, even if it didn't turn into a product that the marketplace wanted, it was something that was going to solve a pain point that I was experiencing, so I would benefit.
There wasn't a lot of pressure for us to make sales.
That's a real important piece to this whole story.
I think because of that, we had a lot more freedom and flexibility to, to be able to do what it is that we wanted to do.
Now, what contributed it, what contributed to the product taking off?
I had a lot of existing relationships with people in the marketplace who were experiencing the same frustration that I had.
I think that that served as a great starting point for me because we were able to see right away whether the product had legs.
For example, I said one of the things that we did after the first month, when we got the first beta version, I sold it to a group of friends.
I was in a mastermind.
There was about 20 of us in that mastermind.
We told them about the product that we were creating and we said, would any of you be interested in buying?
We're going to be selling it for this price and we'll give you the beta version for this price.
All 21 of them bought.
So.
So that was a great sign for me because if people weren't willing to pony up with their hard earned money, even friends, then that would have been a red flag.
But in this case, they were all willing to open up their pocketbook and invest in this piece of software.
From there, we gathered feedback from that group and then we prepared for our launch a month later.
We both had email lists, both my partner and myself had an email list and we sent out, we did a launch to that particular audience and that really helped us jumpstart the word of mouth from there.
Omer (17:27.230)
How much did you charge for that first version?
Stu McLaren (17:32.030)
We charged $47.
So to our group of friends, it was $47 for a single site license and we charged them 97 for a multi site.
Then we changed the price obviously when we went to the public and it was 97 for a single site and 297 for a multi site.
Omer (17:50.080)
Okay, and so once you went broader and made this available publicly, what kind of sales did you start seeing?
Stu McLaren (18:00.240)
In the first month we did about $6,000 worth of sales.
The second month that jumped up over $10,000.
The third month we eclipsed over $21,000.
And at that point, that's when I really felt comfortable about this having the potential to be a bonafide business just in and of itself.
At that point, I had a conversation with my wife and my business partner and I basically said, listen, I think this could be blown up into its own company.
And so I want to take, I want to go all in on it and I want to make a go of it because both my business partner and I, we each had our own businesses outside of this particular software company.
But I wanted to commit myself wholeheartedly to this.
And so that's what we did.
In the beginning.
We lived off of my wife's salary as a teacher and I just doubled down and committed 100% of my effort to building this company.
My business partner took a little bit longer to get to the same place, but he eventually did the same thing as well.
In that first year in total, I think we did, it was probably about $400,000, $450,000 worth of sales.
Then the second year is when we eclipsed seven figures.
And then every year thereafter, it has been a seven figure business.
It was a pretty steady and quick growth and I'm certainly blessed for it.
Omer (19:37.910)
When did you first launch the product?
Stu McLaren (19:40.550)
October 22, 2008 is when we went public with it.
Omer (19:46.310)
Okay, so looking back at those early days, what do you think was one of the biggest mistakes that you made?
It doesn't sound like you made many.
Stu McLaren (19:57.910)
Well, no, there was a very big mistake that we made and it nearly cost us our entire business.
So we're a year and a half into it.
Things are going well.
There's myself, my business partner, I mentioned Tracy Childers, and then our lead developer, Mike.
We also at that time had one other full time customer support person and his name was Ray.
He's a really good friend of mine.
There's four of us.
Then in March of 2010, Mike comes to us.
Now Mike is our lead developer.
He comes to us and he says, listen, guys, I love you both and I love what we've created and I see the potential of where this is going.
But here's the thing.
I really want to try and go out on my own and build my own business.
And so there was a part of us that we're excited for him.
He's a friend of ours, you know, he's somebody that has helped us jumpstart our business.
I have great affinity toward him and really want to see him succeed.
I'm excited for him on one hand, and then the other hand, it's like the old crap moment.
What are we going to do?
This guy is our lead developer.
We're going to have to A, find somebody to replace him and B, what is that going to mean for our business?
It put us in a real vulnerable place because we struggled to find somebody of his caliber.
What ended up happening was that we had intended to hire one person and we ended up hiring six people.
What happened was we both had to take a step back in terms of our salary again to be able to afford the new people that we had hired.
And then even with that, the people that we had hired weren't at the level that Mike was and it was really challenging.
And then to add another layer of complexity, WordPress released a brand new version of WordPress that just absolutely kiboshed wishlist member and it created a support nightmare.
So here we are, we've got developers working on the product who aren't as familiar with it as Mike and may not be admittedly at the skill level that Mike is at.
Then we've got the complexity that WordPress just released these new updates that totally kiboshed the product.
Now we're struggling to be able to get the product back just to ground zero so that it's not causing problems.
Then we've got to deal with all of the support that's coming in as a result of that.
It was an absolute nightmare of a time from Mike ended up leaving us in April.
So from April, May, June, July, it was a nightmare.
We were barely able to keep our head above water with all of the support chaos and all of the issues that were popping up.
Then my business partner Tracy said to me, stu, I think I'm going to fly to the Philippines and I'm going to hire Mike for a week of consulting to help us get wishlist member back to ground zero so that it is not causing problems.
It works flawlessly with the new version of WordPress, blah, blah, blah, because Mike lived in the Philippines.
And I said, okay.
I said, Well, I don't think that you should go on that trip alone.
I think I want to come on that trip with you.
He said, okay, great.
I said, and I don't think that we should hire Mike for a week of consulting.
I think that we should try to get him back.
And I think that we should not only try to get him back, but I think we should make him a partner in the business.
And I'll never forget my business partner, Tracy, kind of looking at me like, really?
Do we really want to give up ownership stake in all of this?
It took me a fair amount to be able to convince him of that.
We went back and forth, and my argument was like, listen, dude, we're a software company, but neither of us, you nor I, when crap hits the fan, can roll up our sleeves and fix the product.
I would love to have somebody who's got skin in the game that is capable of fixing anything and everything, and I think that he deserves to be a partner in the business.
Tracy agreed.
We both flew over to the Philippines, and we met with Mike.
I'll never forget that meeting.
We were in a coffee shop.
The first question I asked Mike was, how's your business going?
Because, remember, he had left to go start his own business.
And he said to me, he's like, well, it's going okay.
He said, but I got to be honest, it's been difficult.
He's like, I haven't been able to find time to be able to do the things that I really love, which is coding.
He's like, I'm so caught up in all of the administrative side of running a business that it just hasn't given me the time to be able to focus on what I want to do best.
Now, secretly, inside of me, I was like, yes, that's exactly what.
What I want to hear.
Long story short, we enter into the conversation, and I start the pitch for him to come back.
The more I talked about it, about him becoming a partner in the business, him being able to focus on what he does best, which is development and then developing a team around him and guiding those young developers and growing them, the more excited he got.
By the end of the conversation, he looked at us and he smiled, and.
And he said, you know what?
I'd be stupid to say no.
He's like, I'm in.
So Tracy and I are just like, thank the Lord.
This was certainly our biggest moment in our business.
And then we walk outside with Mike afterwards, and he said, guys, can I just be honest with you?
And we said, well, yeah, we would hope you'd feel comfortable to be honest with us.
For sure.
He's like, well, right before I came to this meeting, my wife actually suggested that I ask for my job back.
So I looked at him and smiled and I said, well, listen, here's what I want you to do.
I want you to go back to your wife tonight and I want you to say, you know what?
I took your advice and I not only got my job back, but I convinced the guys that I should be a partner in the business.
I said, you do that, you're going to get the best sex that you've gotten in months, my friend.
That's what ended up happening.
He came back on board and it completely transformed the direction of our company.
He not only was able to single handedly fix all of the issues and get wishlist member back on track, but then most importantly was that he taught and nurtured a team of developers around him.
That's the biggest mistake that we made in the beginning was that we didn't have redundancy in terms of people's ability to, to be able to overlap for one another so that if somebody leaves, we don't skip a beat.
But we didn't do that.
Mike was our go to guy.
He was our go to guy for development, for improving the product.
He was our go to guy for any technical support.
So no wonder he wanted to go out on his own.
He was just getting inundated with all of that stuff.
And he was only one guy.
When he started building a team, it transformed our company and we never had those problems again.
So that was a huge mistake that we made in the beginning and a huge lesson learned that we corrected thereafter.
Omer (27:30.140)
Is Mike still involved in the business today?
Stu McLaren (27:32.620)
Absolutely.
Yep.
He has thrived.
And like I said, he's not only been an incredible asset in terms of his development skills, but he's been an incredible mentor to our younger developers and has really grown and nurtured those guys.
And they're all ridiculously skilled.
I certainly give Mike a ton of credit for that.
Omer (27:57.560)
Okay, so what sort of revenue are you guys doing this year?
Stu McLaren (28:02.760)
As I said, Multiple seven figures.
Omer (28:05.880)
Have you guys got to 4 million?
Stu McLaren (28:10.040)
I don't think.
We haven't discussed this with my other business partners.
Want to get into the details of exactly how much and all that kind of stuff, but it has been a very successful multiple seven figure business since we started or since after the first year.
Omer (28:27.870)
Okay, so I want to talk a little bit about Rhino support and just kind of what happened there and how you built that business.
So let's kind of spend a little bit of time just maybe talking briefly about that.
And then I want to make sure we have enough time to talk about that blog post that you put out there yesterday.
Stu McLaren (28:51.040)
Sure.
Omer (28:52.400)
Okay.
So Rhino Support, you said it started from a similar situation where, you know, you were experiencing pains and you felt that there was an opportunity for another software product.
When was this?
Stu McLaren (29:08.720)
This was in August 2012, and I was.
Every year, my wife and I take our top donors for our charity over to Kenya, where our top donors get to see the schools that they've helped build.
We spend time with the kids in the community and so forth.
One of the donors that came on that trip, his name was Scott Brandley.
Scott himself owned his own own software company.
And during that trip, we just had a ton of great conversations.
One of them centered around the frustration that we were experiencing with our support desk.
He too experienced a similar frustration and began telling me how he and his team had built this solution called Rhino Support.
And by the sounds of what he was telling me, it sounded like a dream solution.
It solved all the problems that we were experiencing and it just sounded great.
When we got back from Africa, he sent me access and it did everything that he said it would do.
But the harsh reality of it was it looked awful.
So the design of it was terrible.
The user experience was terrible.
When he asked for my feedback, I was just straight up with him and I just said, dude, I think you got a great product.
It does exactly what you say it would do.
But from a design perspective, it's awful.
I have experience with designing things that are very user friendly.
I think that that's a huge thing, especially when you've got a product or a software or solution that the mass market is going to be using.
It's got to be user friendly.
And this certainly wasn't so.
Long story short, he said, well, why don't we team up and do this together?
That's ultimately what we did.
So our company teamed up with his company and then we took over.
We completely redesigned the product.
We took over, we rebranded the whole thing.
We rebranded all the marketing and so forth.
That essentially was the division of labor.
Scott and his team were responsible for the product itself and maintaining the technical side of it.
And our team was responsible for the design and the marketing.
That whole product was built out of our need and their need.
And of course, we made all kinds of adjustments to it based on our experience with a support desk.
And it turned out to be an incredible Product that I'm definitely really proud of as well.
Omer (31:46.270)
Did they have customers already paying for the product when you got involved?
Stu McLaren (31:51.070)
Yeah, very few though.
I think there was like less than 30 paying customers at that point.
Omer (31:56.910)
Okay, so what did you do there to try and build, you know, acquire customers and what were some of the marketing strategies that you used?
Stu McLaren (32:06.030)
That one was tough because the product itself wasn't like anything.
It wasn't sexy.
You know, it's a support desk.
And so support desks is like something that somebody thinks about long after or down the road.
It's not something that is naturally going to draw people in.
It actually proved to be a much harder sale than wishlist member did.
But initially one of the things that we started doing was we offered it to a variety of influencers that we had access to.
And the benefit there is that because the software required their customers, if they were sending in help desk tickets or whatever, they would get to experience the help desk and.
Or if they were doing it all via email, which Rhino support allows you to do, they would still see the Rhino support at the bottom of the emails that would go back and forth.
So we consciously designed the product to be able to market itself based on the users using it, much like Hotmail did way back in the day.
I may be dating myself here, but when I was in high school and Hotmail came out, it was all the rage because a nobody had an email address.
So that was a great thing.
It solved that pain point.
But the second thing was when you sent an email at the bottom of it, it said sent using Hotmail or whatever it said, anybody reading that would then see that and then they would go and create a Hotmail account as well.
That's kind of the foresight that we had with this, was that anytime somebody is responding to a help desk ticket, it would say, powered by Rhino support.
By getting it in the hands of influencers who have a lot of people who are sending in support requests and so forth, our product was naturally getting exposed to their audience.
The hope was that they would then come and sign up for a lot of the people that did register for that product and still use that product.
That was the case.
They saw the product in action, liked the experience, and naturally went to find out more about it.
That was one of our, certainly our early strategies that was baked into the product itself.
Omer (34:36.169)
And how did that help you?
I mean, so you had, you started out with, you said about 30 odd customers.
By the end of that first year of you being involved, do you remember how many Customers you had.
Stu McLaren (34:48.249)
Like I said, it was a struggle.
I think we ended up with a few hundred at that point, which was great.
I mean, it was still, the business was paying for itself.
It just wasn't growing at the rate that we had hoped.
It was more challenging to sell it than I anticipated, even though the product itself was spectacular.
Omer (35:11.710)
Okay, so building in this sort of virality into the product through these emails and the Powered by Rhino support helped to build a little bit of early traction.
And then so in the second year, what else did you do?
Stu McLaren (35:26.000)
Well, the second year we had a lot of plans to be able to do some big things from the marketing perspective.
I had some really fun ideas that I really wanted to explore, but the reality is we just never got time to go after them.
The sad part about Rhino support was that it wasn't the primary product or solution for either business.
So it wasn't the primary focus for our Wishlist business because Wishlist member was.
That was the thing that was bringing in the bread and butter.
It was a secondary product for us.
And then it wasn't the primary product for Scott and his team either because they had other solutions that were far more successful for them as well.
Because it wasn't the primary focus for either side.
It never got the attention that it necessarily deserved.
There were many ideas that we had that we wanted to explore from a marketing perspective, but they required time to be able to see them out properly and we just never got around to it.
Omer (36:31.450)
How is the business doing today?
Stu McLaren (36:34.010)
It's doing great.
It's still continuing to pay for itself.
It generates money, it generates revenue every month.
It's always in the black.
So that's the good thing.
The downside is that it still is a secondary product for both businesses, but that's about to change.
We've come to an agreement where Wishlist is going to spin off its own version of the help desk and that's going to be incorporated into a product offer that will include a variety of different plug ins and services.
Scott and his team are going to spin off the Rhino because they have ideas of how they would like to bundle it with the software that they sell as well.
It's going to be essentially, the company is going to be split.
The product itself is essentially going to stay the same, but I think both sides are going to end up marketing it a little bit differently, primarily through bundling it with existing software that either side is selling.
So then that way it does become a primary focus for both sides and everybody wins.
Omer (37:39.970)
Okay, that is the end of part one of this interview with Stu McLaren.
In part two, we talk about an announcement that he just made the day before this interview where he decided to sell his stake in his software business and go do something else.
It's an interesting story, and I think there are valuable lessons in there for all types of entrepreneurs on the importance of focus and what that really means.