Omer (00:09.760)
Welcome to another episode of the SaaS Podcast.
I'm your host Omer Khan and this is a 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 Jared Brown, the co founder and CEO of Hubstaff and a time tracking and workforce management software for remote teams.
In 2012, Jared got a message on LinkedIn from Dave, a complete stranger at the time, pitching an idea for a SaaS product.
Dave had already built a basic product that was generating some revenue, but he needed a technical co founder to help take it to the next level.
Jared was intrigued, but also cautious, and it took three months of discussions before he finally agreed to join forces with Dave.
But finding traction in the early days was far from easy.
The founders were constantly torn between working on the product and trying to acquire customers.
They were stuck in an endless cycle of building features, launching them, and then realizing they still weren't getting enough traction.
On top of that, they struggled with pricing strategy, debating whether to keep prices low to attract more customers or charge more to increase revenue.
There were also constant discussions about which features to prioritize and how to allocate their limited development resources.
And despite seeing some early signs of success, they couldn't shake that nagging feeling that maybe they were kidding themselves.
Would enough people really be willing to pay for this product?
But they persevered, and today hubstaff generates around $22 million in ARR, serving over 16,000 customers with a team of just over 100 people.
In this episode, you're going to learn how they generated demand for their product and built a wait list of nearly 2,000 people by the time they launched their beta version.
How Dave used content marketing, writing blog posts and ebooks and focusing on SEO to attract potential customers and build an initial audience.
How they overcame early challenges like pricing debates and feature prioritization to bootstrap the business to 6 million ARR pre Covid.
And how they doubled revenue to $12 million in 12 months during the pandemic.
And why they finally raised funding after a decade of bootstrapping the business.
And we talk about why iterating on the onboarding flow and tracking engagement metrics was crucial to building a product that people loved.
So I hope you enjoy it.
Jared, welcome to the show.
Jared Brown (02:44.670)
Thanks for having me.
I'm excited to be on here.
Omer (02:47.590)
My pleasure.
Do you have a favorite quote?
Something that inspires or motivates you that you can share with us?
Jared Brown (02:52.550)
Yeah.
Well, one of the quotes that stuck with me when I first read it was from Steve Jobs and he talked about making a dent in the universe.
And it's something that just really resonated with me of like, you know, if you're going to spend like we've spent 11 years now building Hubstaff and I think about like, why did we do it?
And yes, wanted to start a business and make a living off of it.
But it's more than that.
It's like, can I put something out into the world that actually makes an impact, leaves a mark out there?
And something I get excited about is hundreds of thousands of users getting to use our software and making an impact in their lives.
So that's a quote that stands out to me.
Omer (03:35.240)
Yeah.
Great.
So tell us about Hubstaff.
What does the product do, who's it for, and what's the main problem you're helping to solve?
Jared Brown (03:43.910)
Yeah, so Hubstaff is.
It started out as time tracking and proof of work software.
And what that means is not just collecting the time that people are spending working, but also how are they doing that work and answering those questions around how they're spending their day.
That's how we started the business.
And that was the kind of the elevator pitch or the initial use case.
And.
And we've since grown that to be more of a workforce analytics platform so that you now can, you can manage people's schedules, you can see how much time they spend in meetings.
You can really get a real bird's eye and detailed view of where that time is being spent.
Omer (04:26.080)
Great.
And give us a sense of the size of the business, where are you in terms of revenue, customers, size of team.
Jared Brown (04:33.600)
Yep.
So we started in early 2012, in May of 2012.
And we've grown that steadily now to a $22 million ARR business.
We have slightly over 100 team members working at Hubstaff and over 16,000 customers.
Omer (04:51.970)
Awesome.
We should also point out that the business was bootstrapped for the first 10 or 11 years.
Jared Brown (05:01.330)
Yes.
Yep, we were fully bootstrapped.
Never didn't take any investment dollars up until August of last year and had no debt on the business either, which is something both my co founder and I are very proud that we were able to do this in a customer funded way.
Omer (05:16.590)
Great.
So let's talk about where the idea came from.
So you and your co founder, Dave, you said you set out in 2012, but where did the idea come from?
Jared Brown (05:28.910)
He was running at the time an SEO business where they were doing video production and blog writing and basically Back in the early days of Google when it was easy to try to game it and help clients get better rankings in Google.
So he had 40 people working for him at that time through Upwork.
And he looked at that and the business is doing just over a million dollars a year in revenue.
He looked at the 10% markup that Upwork was applying on these 40 contractors and thought to himself, I, I can find these people, I can hire them outside of this Marketplace and use LinkedIn, use job boards.
But what he didn't want to give up by leaving upwork was the software that they had put in place, which was this time tracking desktop app that also recorded some proof of work metrics to show that this person in Spain or Ukraine or wherever you hire them, you've never met them before when they send you an invoice, were they working for the time that they invoiced you for?
And that was the simple use case.
And he, he was looking for a tool.
He thought he was just going to search on Google, find some standalone tool that could do this.
Didn't find anything in this is late 2011 and thought, you know, I think there's an opportunity here to create a standalone SaaS product just taking that software component that he was used to using on Upwork.
Omer (06:53.460)
So he reached out to you on LinkedIn, right?
Jared Brown (06:56.260)
He did.
Omer (06:57.060)
And did you, did you guys know each other?
Jared Brown (06:59.480)
No, it was cold outreach through LinkedIn.
And he was looking at that time he'd already built a proof of concept using a development agency out of Russia to build for $10,000 a basic version of this software just to kind of prove out if there was a market for it.
And he did.
By the time he was reaching out to me through LinkedIn, he had 15 paying customers.
And he knew that to take this and turn it into a real business, he couldn't rely on this agency to do the development for the next several years.
So he was looking for a tech co founder that as in his words, somebody who would lay awake at night worrying about the technical issues while he laid awake at night worrying about the business and marketing side of it.
And he wanted somebody local.
And I was in Indianapolis at the time where he lives, and it luckily was kind of a small pond of tech people in that space.
So he reached out to me.
Omer (08:02.990)
And what were you doing at the time?
Jared Brown (08:05.870)
So I was doing some contract work for a local company there in Indiana and also running.
And this is part of why he reached out.
I was running a site called Talentopoly that it was a community for developers and designers.
And I was kind of playing around with that nights and weekends, building that and trying to get that out into the world.
And he looked at that and said because he told me this in subsequent calls he was like, it stood out to him that I had been able to build something and get it done and released.
And when he was looking at other possible tech co founders, they had, on paper they looked good, but what have they put out there?
How do they actually execute and get stuff completed?
And that stood out to him.
Omer (08:52.170)
So I'm curious why you said yes to a random stranger who reaches out to you.
Jared Brown (09:00.770)
It wasn't an immediate yes.
Omer (09:02.850)
How long did it take?
Jared Brown (09:04.610)
Three months.
Omer (09:06.290)
Yeah, I want to know what the process was that you went through.
Because I talked to a lot of founders who are non technical and they're looking for a technical co founder.
And I tell them that one, it's a really difficult thing to do to find the right person and secondly, it's not like hiring a developer.
If you're going to bring on a co founder, they've really got to buy into your vision and believe in whatever you're doing because they're going to end up spending a lot of time on this thing or even there's the opportunity cost of not giving up what they're doing to make time to even work on this thing part time for a year or whatever.
So what convinced you to say yes?
Even though he took like three months to get there?
Jared Brown (09:54.230)
Yeah, and I will admit, and I've told him this too, when he first reached out, other people had reached out similarly where they have a concept, they think it's a million dollar concept.
They would reach out to me being a developer, like just need to talk Jared into building this thing with sweat equity and we'll be off to the races.
And I all of those people, the difference between when they approached me and when Dave approached me, Dave got on a 30 minute call with me and starts off by saying first he could easily describe the elevator pitch, what was the value prop, which is let's have time tracking plus proof of work.
You get the invoice, you know, they really worked for that time, you happily pay the invoice.
That made sense.
And then number two, he had already done a proof of concept.
He, he had already basically followed the lean startup methodology that was really popular at the time.
And I had read the book about that and I asked him was like, so how'd you know to follow the lean startup methodology?
And you've read the Book, Right.
And he's like, no clue what I was talking about and just happened to like, just intuitively that's just, he's all about execution.
So he just like went from concept to like, I'm going to hire the agency, I'm going to get something out there, I'm going to run some ads, I'm going to start doing some SEO, see if there's demand.
And when he's talking to me, he's rattling off, here's how many visitors I have coming to the website.
Here's how many paying customers that are voting with their wallet that I already have.
This was very different than other people that approached me.
So.
And he'd already, he was running a business doing over a million dollars at the time, which was like, you know, I couldn't even imagine running a business of that size at that time.
So those are the things that hooked me.
And then we, we realized what you were saying.
If you're going to start a business with somebody, you're basically getting married to them, you better like them as a person.
And that's why it took three months.
And like, that was kind of our dating process that happened over the next three months.
Omer (11:57.010)
How much money did the two of you put in to the business to kind of get it to the next level?
I guess from what David already done.
Jared Brown (12:05.770)
Yeah.
So we each, from the, from that point forward, we put $52,000 in between the two of us.
And I know it because we wrote it in like two or three checks.
So it's like, it's a very specific number of like, and, you know, not at that age.
And you know, I didn't have tons of money, so like using that amount of capital to start this business.
And I'm very low risk.
You know, as an entrepreneur, a lot of people will be surprised.
You know, like, I don't want to lose money.
I don't want to put this on the line if I think it's not going to work out.
So that number stood out like it was $52,000 that the two of us put in.
And we were, that got us our first few hires and got us, we started writing code in May of 2012, and in August of 2013, we were able to start charging for the product.
We released into beta in November of 2012.
And then in August of 2013 we began charging and that $52,000 got us through that.
And then we were able to be customer funded from then on.
Omer (13:11.680)
Okay, so let's talk about that first year or so when you start to build the product.
Did you look at what was already there and say, okay, we can just continue the development?
Or was this okay, that was a great proof of concept, but really, I want to do this my way.
Jared Brown (13:32.080)
Yeah, yeah.
It had to be.
Not in any sort of egotistical, it needs to be my code.
It was just the people.
So we were fortunate.
I had gotten to meet somebody in my first job out of college who I would describe as a 10x ER sort of developer, like a.
You know, you meet very few of these types of developers.
You know, you know them when you see them, and they.
What they're capable of and the architecture and the amount of code that they can create like that, I think was very important for us to have in the very beginning stages of the business.
And the reason Dave was coming to me in the first place was because there were bugs, because there were issues with the software.
And he was already starting to see that it wasn't a good foundation to build on.
So we knew we needed to rebuild it.
We had good talent to be able to do the server side programming to come in and do the desktop application as well.
It was actually this 10xer programmer named Ed.
And I asked Ed because he's very much on the server side of development.
I asked him who's going to build the Windows application?
Because my background is in tech.
I have a computer science degree, but my background's all on the server side as well.
So we had server side tied up.
And he goes, well, I have a brother who's a pretty good programmer too, and I think we can talk him into doing the Windows, Linux and Mac desktop app.
And we were able to do that.
And it was really the three of us in those early days that wrote all of that code.
And we knew because of the type of code we could write, we.
We could create a scalable foundation for the software.
So we never had to, you know, fortunately we've never had to make another version.
We've always just added to and evolved the software.
We never had to do a v1 and then a v2 of the platform and move customers over.
And I think that was because of that decision to start it the right way in the beginning.
Omer (15:35.980)
How did you spend that $52,000?
Because it's.
I mean, even.
Even back in 2012, it doesn't sound like that would even pay much for a developer's time.
Jared Brown (15:47.830)
No, it doesn't go very far.
It was almost all spent on Ed and his brother on development.
That's where almost all of it went.
So we, I think our ad budget back then was maybe $500 a month.
Dave and I obviously are working for free.
And so Dave's just handling all of the.
He's writing the content, he wrote an ebook, he's writing the blog posts.
At that point he's doing all of the SEO, he's managing the books.
So it was just.
We knew that we were going to live or die by the product.
We had to get this to a certain point and we felt like we were onto something that we knew it's not going to be too long before others start to recognize that there's an opportunity here.
So there's a bit of a race component of like let's get this product to that next stage of features that are immediately being requested from users.
Omer (16:49.380)
You mentioned that I think August 2013 you began charging for the product, but how long did it take for you to actually have users on the product?
Like when did you get to a point where you were able to ship the first version?
Jared Brown (17:04.090)
Yep.
So we, because Dave had already started the website before he even approached me and we, we ended up keeping the name.
We went through a list of probably 50 different possible names and once and decided at the end of the day Hubstaff was, was the name that we really both still like so stuck with the name.
It already had some SEO, it already had some traffic coming to it.
We shut that agency software down and put up a wait list because we were not getting enough new customers to make it worth the distraction of trying to support that software and handle support requests for it while being heads down writing the correct version of the software.
So we made that decision to shut the website off, basically put up a wait list and then we had probably 1,000 or 2,000 people on the wait list by November when we had a, you know, our first version, our beta version ready to go and put it out there.
And it was late October, early November.
Turned the website back on the marketing page to it invited these users in and we were, I remember it distinctly because in previous, like I ever since graduated from college, I'd always tried to get, you know, being a developer, I would work on these projects and that I would get very excited about the potential for them and you know, be very convinced that hundreds or thousands of users are going to want to try this software.
I'd build it, I'd put it out there and it was like a real struggle to get them to use this thing versus with Hubstaff, when we turn that website back on, we're getting 100 users signing up for it.
Almost in the first day that we turned it back on, it would be at a, it was at a run rate of about 100 users signing up a day from that first day.
Omer (18:55.480)
Okay, great.
So you get the product out there, you've got some traction, some momentum with the waiting list.
But it's still a free product.
Right.
So that's.
Yeah, the jury's still out.
So you come August time comes and you decide you're going to start charging for it.
One, what was the first, how much did you start charging initially?
And two, what happened when you turned that on?
Jared Brown (19:25.940)
Yeah, I would say of all of the debates that Dave and I had through the years, the probably the healthiest debates where we would come at it from different angles was probably around pricing.
Dave had the mindset that we go volume, we go low price, high volume.
Let's try to.
The reality was something that he would think about a lot too is what every customer that we get in here, every account that gets created for you to get real value of the software, you're going to invite other people in.
So we want to give it away as much as possible.
Let people invite their team members in, they're going to learn about Hubstaff.
Maybe when they move on to the next job, they're going to recommend it to their new employer or their clients.
So we started off with a, I believe it was a free forever plan for, for up to three users and then we charge something like five dollars a user for every.
If you were four plus you get charged five bucks a user.
And I think we might even back then have said your first three users, even if you're beyond three, your first three are free.
I mean we were, were bending over backwards to try to make price not an issue.
We didn't want to lose this momentum that we had built up.
I think we probably over indexed to being a little too inexpensive.
But the conversion rate was very high because it really kind of a no brainer.
If this thing could save you from one extra hour being invoiced to you, that wasn't really worked, then it's well worth the money to $5 a month.
Omer (21:08.600)
And what happened when you started, you put the payment option in there.
Like how long did it take for that first customer paying customer to sign up?
Jared Brown (21:18.760)
Oh, probably, I mean, well, we converted people over that were on the free plan too.
So that was all of our existing customers.
We have been messaging them that the beta is going to come to an end.
You're going to start getting charged.
So we had that first customer start their 30 day trial that day and become a paid customer 30 days later.
And then also all of the existing customers switch over, over that.
You know, we probably did it over a 30 day period as well.
But it was, it was immediate.
Omer (21:50.550)
So I think you told me that it took about two and a half, three years to get to your first million in ARR.
What was the biggest growth driver?
Was that SEO?
Jared Brown (22:04.150)
Yeah, yep.
SEO.
It continues to be the biggest driver for us today.
And back then it was 99% of our customer acquisition channel was SEO.
And I really credit that to Dave coming up with a concept that like, I think, I think of it like a totem pole of pain points.
We were at the very top of that totem pole of these.
Our typical customer back then was somebody who was starting their own business.
They were funding it out of pocket.
They were hiring these developers that were less expensive overseas.
Maybe they're not technical in nature.
So when this developer says it's going to take me two months to build this WordPress platform, plug in and now you're in month three or four and it's not finished yet, you don't have much recourse to know what's going on.
Are they, are they really working for all of that time?
Are they working for multiple clients?
And so these people I believe are really having like sleepless nights and they're waking up in the morning going there's got to be a solution to this problem.
They're going to Google and they're searching for our type of software.
And so the name of the game was just get found, just be in the top three for that.
When they do the searches, figure out what those various keywords are that they're searching on and just do whatever you have to do to be in the top three and then the product will take care of the rest.
Omer (23:30.410)
Do you think SEO worked quicker for you guys?
Well, it wasn't really quicker.
Right.
Because it was.
Dave was already kind of doing some of this work before the two of you even joined forces, right?
Jared Brown (23:42.490)
Yep, yep.
Omer (23:43.530)
So that'll kind of help you to hit the ground running fairly quickly with once you had the new product, product built.
Jared Brown (23:47.800)
And he was still able to do some of that while we were, you know, once we set, we shut the website down, he was still writing blog posts, he started, he worked on an ebook.
You know, he's doing all of that type of stuff still.
So I generally, you know, you won't see results for that three to six month period of like putting that content out there.
It's got to take a little while, but we already had that head start.
Omer (24:09.960)
So Dave was focused on growth and SEO and content and you were focused on the product and continuing to evolve that what was going on competitively.
Because it sounds like, you know, the SEO, you've, you've identified keywords, there's, you know, fairly decent demand.
Once people find you, they're signing up.
Was there a lot of competitive offerings around at the time?
Jared Brown (24:42.100)
There were not, no.
Now that was another.
That part of that three month dating process was of us evaluating the space in more detail and really coming up with like a checklist and saying, is there a virality piece to this?
Is there, are there going to be a lot of, are there a lot of competitors now and do we think there'll be a lot of competitors in the future?
And something we've been very conscious about from the beginning was this is not a solution.
At least what we started with isn't a solution that everybody's going to look for.
It's, you know, there's an aspect to the software that some people may not want to use this type of software because of the proof of work piece to it.
And it worked for us in keeping competitors to a minimum.
It wasn't like when you ask yourself, are one of the incumbents one of the big software companies gonna move into the space?
We were pretty confident that they weren't gonna wanna touch the space, at least for a very long time.
So then we knew we're just gonna fight against other companies that would be our size.
And how many of those did we see out there?
There were like one or two, you know, in late 2012 and they were all getting, they were getting started right around the same time as us.
So it was not a highly competitive space.
And luckily for that next five years, we didn't see a huge influx of competitors come into the space.
So it allowed us to cut our teeth and learn because we started from step one, like learning how do you create a good product, how do you do SEO?
Well, we certainly didn't start out doing those things at a very high level, but we were able to survive because it wasn't a super competitive space and gave us the room to learn that,
Omer (26:30.660)
okay, so you get to the first million, I guess if we just counting 20, somewhere around 2016, I'm guessing is when you get there.
SEO has been the biggest driver.
I know you said that, hey, you know, the product has also been one of the reasons why we've been able to get to where we are today and the importance of building the right product.
And we always hear, you know, building a great product is super important, but what does that actually mean?
What does that mean to you?
Jared Brown (27:05.950)
Well, number, number one, and I think this is the right mindset to adopt is to not, not think that you have a great product.
As soon as you start thinking that, then you rest on your laurels.
You're like, all right, you know, we just like, you want to iterate on what you're doing, whether it's the SEO, whether it's your parts of your product.
I believe just rapid iteration is a superpower.
And when we looked at, even from the beginning, we were faced with, we have 10 more features that customers are asking for.
We can spend all of our time over the next three months building those 10 features, or we can do five or eight of those features and spend some of that bandwidth building test systems into the software, building data collection, integrating tools like Segment or Mixpanel, or at that time it was kissmetrics.
Get insights into how users are flowing through the pathways of the software that you've created and then work on iterating on that.
So something we did with like the onboarding flow, we wouldn't take the approach where we would improve the onboarding flow and then be happy with it and leave it alone for six months.
We would do a project to improve it, and then next month we would revisit it and look at the, we're looking at the data weekly along the way and do another version of it and another version after that and just never stop improving the onboarding flow and how you're acquiring these customers.
So I think that when you, when you look at how do you create a good product, I think understand what the features are that solve the pain points your customers need.
Yes, you need those.
But then how easily do they get through into the software and get to those features?
And how are you improving that flow?
Omer (29:03.970)
You were doing product LED growth before.
It was a thing.
Jared Brown (29:09.100)
I remember when that really started getting coined as a term 5 or so years ago.
And it just seemed like, yeah, right, wasn't everybody doing that already?
Omer (29:21.180)
So you mentioned kissmetrics and Mixpanel.
I'm curious maybe if you were doing it again today, you were starting over at what and you were using one of those tools or something similar.
What are some of the things that you would be tracking in terms of metrics to get some of these fundamental things in place?
Because I see this a lot with Teams like, yeah, we're going to use Mixpanel.
And then it's like they're overwhelmed with data and they're just like wasting so much time just trying to make sense of it.
And so from the experience that you've had and if you're doing this again, how would you do it in a way where you could use these tools, get the instrumentation in place, get just the essential data that you need to be able to make faster decisions?
Jared Brown (30:11.510)
Yeah, I really liked kissmetrics.
I think it was one of the first that popularized an easy to look at funnel of here's step one.
You go to the marketing page, then you go to the sign up page and then we've always had three, four or five steps in the, in the post sign up trial, like getting your trial started.
And I would say just start there.
I wouldn't look at a lot of other like we would play with hotjar off and on throughout the years trying to look at recorded sessions and see how people are using like actually using the software.
And I feel like you're right.
You can get paralyzed by looking at too much data.
Figure out that that initial flow coming into the software and just event those steps.
Just even if it's just page view data and not even events, you don't need the buttons evented, you don't need all of that detail.
You just need step one, step two, step three and what's the falloff percent between them?
How many are getting to the end of the wizard and then look at, you know, how many of them are then going to maybe one, two or three key pages within the product after they get through the wizard.
And then how many are going to the like subscribing to a paid plan and there's your funnel and just now go through six iterations of how to improve that over the next half a year to a year.
Omer (31:40.550)
Great.
So it sounds like you got pretty good at that in terms of you're attracting the traffic.
You're, you're basically getting these people to sign up, go through the process and come out on the other side and become a paying customer.
What about in terms of usage?
So once they're actually a customer, what are some of the things that you looked at to make sure are they actually still using the product?
How frequently are they using the product?
Why did you do that?
Jared Brown (32:15.770)
Yeah, I think there again simple is kind of king.
Just look at daily active users, Weekly active users, what is that kind of histogram over a month of somebody's usage pattern?
So they Use it a few times every day for the first three or four days and then you see this drop off and why are they not coming back seven days later or 10 days later?
And usually the barrier to creating the habit, it happens very early.
So if you can get somebody to come back every day or every other day to your software for just five to 10 days then they're typically that's going to be very highly correlated to them continuing to use it for months, even years at that point.
So it's just get them to use it for that first week or two and that we started off with a 30 day trial and we decreased that to 14 days and actually saw conversion rates go up.
By decreasing that it created that sense of urgency for the customer.
They knew like I don't have all month to try to figure out if I want to use this or not.
Let's get into it now.
The more you can front load and push them to go and try things out like iterate on the getting started system, try a lot of different ways to get them to go and use the different features.
At least go to the page.
You know we've experimented with welcome videos when welcome mats when you go to a new feature, try it as a pop up versus on the actual page itself.
Just really trying a lot of different things and looking at what the data is telling you there.
Omer (33:56.320)
I think some people listening to your story might be thinking you got this idea, you built this product, you already had a waiting list growing, you start charging for it, people start paying and within a few years you hit your first million in ARR.
It kind of sounds like too easy.
And I sort of said that to you before we started recording.
And then you told me about
Jared Brown (34:26.829)
all
Omer (34:26.949)
the times that you had tried to do this and it failed.
So can you just talk about that?
Because I think that really is, I think that really helps will help people to understand.
The reason things went so much better for you guys this time was because all the reps that you had put in before you got to this point.
Jared Brown (34:47.229)
So it has always stood out to me and it's something that I share with other entrepreneurs when they think they ask what's something that you can tell me to kind of set me on the right path?
And the number one thing I say is don't get too married to your concept.
I'm a big believer.
Come up with five or 10 concepts and try those out.
And I feel like that's kind of what my journey was of being a developer.
I could go put things out into the world.
I didn't have to go find a dev to make what I want, was envisioning.
I could envision it.
I could work hard on it nights and weekends.
And I did that from like through college.
Graduated from college, working my day job, still doing stuff at night and on the weekends and, and built inventory software.
I built talentopoly, the designer developer community.
And I learned through that what it felt like to have to try to.
It's like pushing that boulder up the hill, like trying to get people to care enough about what you care so much about.
You feel like this is gonna be amazing.
You put it out there and you're having to pull people to it.
You know the feeling when it's happening of like, this isn't coming easy.
I'm having to create the market for it.
And there are some concepts you do like, they're brand new.
There's not, there's not latent demand out there that's pent up, ready to be tapped.
That's not every concept.
But having been through both sides of it, feeling what it was like to try to create that demand.
And then over here where it was just, let's go meet that demand where it is and go to that and provide the solution.
I can.
The feeling is night and day different.
And it like, maybe there's that extra bonus points for like, you created a brand new market and that's even cooler.
But I'm a big believer in go find where there is the demand that's not being satisfied today and go create something to meet that.
It is incredibly rewarding.
And you know, while you're doing it, you know it because it feels that way.
You can tell the difference.
Omer (37:04.940)
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
I think that that's a, that's a great distinction in terms of if you're going out there and, and effectively creating a new category, you've got a whole set of other problems to deal with because no one's even looking to solve that problem.
So you've got to educate people.
And if it's not really the right problem, it's a very, very, you know, it is pushing a boulder uphill.
And then you've got this other situation where it's like you find a problem that exists, but it's not the most painful problem.
So people tell you, yeah, this is a problem, but they don't really feel motivated to do anything about it or haven't really invested a lot of time and effort trying to solve it.
Right.
And I've seen founders, like, who find that problem and they talk to customers and it's like.
And that's the thing they try to go and solve and then they still struggle because people just don't care that much about solving it.
But once you get to that point where you find this, this bleeding neck problem, it's like you don't have to do a lot of convincing.
You just need to get the solution in front of people.
And so I think that I've talked to many founders about this and I think it's a very difficult thing to explain to somebody who hasn't experienced it.
But it is like night and day in terms of the reaction and how people lean in and want to use the product or want to pay for you.
They pay you for it before it's ready.
Right.
It's like it's a very different type of experience when you find that right problem.
Jared Brown (38:46.280)
Yeah.
And the old adage about an MVP that, you know, if you weren't embarrassed when you put it out there, you waited too long.
If it is not where there's pent up demand, you will like, it won't work.
You'll put something out there that is embarrassingly basic.
And yeah, it doesn't work because it has to be that much better to even have a chance of creating the demand.
But over here, that first version that we put out, yes, technically the foundation was very good.
But UI wise, we're all like architect developers, the three of us.
The UI was atrocious and it didn't matter.
Omer (39:25.560)
Yeah.
All right, so you get to the first million 2016, you continue to grow, but you know, growth is relatively slow.
Then we get to Covid.
What was the.
Before we went, we sort of went into the pandemic.
What was the size of the business?
Where were you kind of roughly in
Jared Brown (39:46.280)
terms of revenue or roughly 6,6 million in arrangement.
And like you said, the slow climb, like we were slowly climbing steady, slow and steady towards 7 and 8.
You can kind of see the trajectory.
But you know, we were on the 10 year path or 15 year path to becoming a $15 million a year business.
Omer (40:09.110)
And then what happened with COVID Yeah,
Jared Brown (40:11.830)
Covid, basically we have been.
I think this is another key point too, with that demand that we had tapped into.
That demand was also tied to a trend, a growing trend that is remote work and hiring people to work remotely, just even globally for your workforce.
And so I think that was growing on the similar steady linear path.
And then Covid, with the great experiment of having everybody work from home, showed a lot of companies that this can be done.
For some companies, it's maybe not ideal.
Yes, they should be back in the office or go hybrid.
But for many companies it opened their eyes to, this is really a way you can run a business and you can save a lot of capital running a business remotely.
And so it accelerated, what we saw is accelerated this trend that was up and to the right, but on a linear path.
It stepped it up probably 10 years overnight and just set it as a new.
Here's the floor for it now.
And we doubled in size over the next just over 12 months because of it.
Omer (41:22.620)
Wow.
So, I mean that, that turned out to be just the shift towards remote work turned out to be a really good thing for you guys in the business.
One of the things that I've also seen with many startups is, you know, they, they got a great bump during COVID and then after the pandemic, it was like back to reality.
And you know, in many cases they were like in the same place or maybe even slightly worse off than they were before they went into the pandemic.
What was that experience for you guys?
Jared Brown (42:01.170)
Yeah, and we, we were slightly worried of what, what would happen.
You know, naturally we knew not everybody's going to be working remote 100% going forward.
So what, what's going to be the new normal is how we refer to it.
Where, where is this going to settle out?
And what we have found is that it has really, in the two and a half years or so, three years afterwards, it really normalized at about 3x what it was before COVID So you had 7 to 10% of the workforce working fully remotely pre Covid.
Now it's 30% plus.
Where we had confidence that we weren't going to return back to pre Covid levels was just a lot of companies shed their offices.
They're like, we don't need to pay for that anymore.
Look at productivity stayed the same or went up and we're not having to incur that cost.
We also knew that that trend that we've been riding since 2012, when we were, we've been big believers in, from day one, that trend's not going anywhere.
That trend's going to keep growing.
So yeah, it was going to come back down from, from that height, but we were pretty confident that, you know, we had stepped it up.
And like, how could we ever have guessed that we were going to create something that was so uniquely positioned for that moment, A very unfortunate moment that, you know, the silver lining was it was a huge boon to the business.
And just like you couldn't even plan it to be that well positioned for.
I really do think that the remote trend and global hiring trend is the biggest shift in business and how businesses have been run since the advent of the PC.
This is like the second major moment and we were able to capitalize on it to some extent.
Omer (43:48.570)
So the business, as you told us at the start, is doing about 22 million in ARR today.
You basically bootstrapped all the way and other than, I guess in the last six months, you raised some money through private equity when you said yes to Dave in 2012.
We all have hopes when you start some new thing, what you wish it could become or what you hope it could become.
But realistically, what was your realistic goal at the time that you thought, if I could just get to this, I'd be happy?
Jared Brown (44:30.480)
Yeah.
In those few moments where we weren't chained to our computers and we get together in Dave's basement and have a beer and we're like, oh, what could this become?
I can clearly tell you what we thought.
We were like, we are going to be ecstatic if this gets to 40k of MRR, you know, $500,000 a year run rate.
Like, we're set.
We can't ask for anything more than that.
And that's.
We would sit in his basement and
Omer (44:56.650)
say this, that's amazing.
And what do you think?
I mean, we talked about some of the factors along the way, the product and Covid and move to remote work and whatever.
But what do you think, like when you look back and I say, what's contributed to your success?
Because this is a space where you talked.
There were a couple of competitors at the time, but I also know that other competitors have come and gone in the market.
Right.
So it's not like you were just the first.
So therefore, or one of the first, you made it work.
What was the difference?
Like, why do you think you guys were able to.
To.
To kind of win in this space?
Jared Brown (45:40.200)
Yeah, I think something that has been crucial for us, number one, having the right recipe to start this with.
And I think Dave being having the SEO background in that being what was going to be our number one customer acquisition channel.
And he had the background, he was an expert in that.
So we didn't have to go out and rely on some, you know, agency or hire people to do that.
He could just do that himself and then I could do the tech side.
I didn't write all the code, but I could oversee it.
I knew how to steer that.
I knew how to make sure, we had the right product design and the right tech in place.
Between the two of us, we could cover the jobs that needed to be done over time.
We had to find people to come and take those jobs and do it even better than we can do it.
But in the early days you've got to be able to do that all in your co founding team.
And for a software business I'm a big believer that you need to have a tech co founder right there in the mix that has the equity that is going to work until 2 in the morning, night after night for years to get this to where it needs to be.
And I would say that's point number two is just willing to roll up your sleeves and do the hard work.
When people come to me and they say I've got it, I want to bounce something off of you.
I've got this concept for a business.
It's like you don't know it until you've been through building a business.
That when they say the concept is 5% or 10% or whatever, you know a small portion of like what's going to determine success.
It's like 90% execution.
It's so true.
It's like is once your excitement in the honeymoon period wears off, call that three or six months, are you still going to work until 2 in the morning, night after night, 16 hour, 18 hour days for years to make this a reality and grind your way to that success.
And that's where you get separated from, from the rest.
That's the companies that came and went, they just, they, I think they didn't have the right starting formula and they didn't have that perseverance to just.
I don't even know how we did it.
Looking back on it, I don't know that I could do it again.
But it is just tirelessly grinding it out of it.
Omer (47:57.630)
All right, on that note, we should wrap up.
Let's get onto the lightning round.
I've got seven quick fire questions for you.
What's one of the best pieces of business advice you've received?
Jared Brown (48:09.230)
As I mentioned earlier, I would say if your MVP doesn't embarrass you, then you spent too long polishing it.
Get it out there quicker and start validating your concept much faster.
Omer (48:20.510)
What, what book would you recommend to our audience and why?
Jared Brown (48:23.320)
I love the High Growth Handbook.
Big fan of it and open it regularly to specific chapters to consult things.
Omer (48:31.240)
What's one attribute or characteristic in your mind of a successful founder?
Jared Brown (48:35.720)
Be willing to put in the hard work day after day.
Month after month, year after year.
Omer (48:40.600)
What's your favorite personal productivity tool or habit?
Jared Brown (48:44.120)
I started doing this in the last year and I'm a big believer now is blocking out focus time.
Don't let anybody take that over.
Have multiple hours consecutively of focus time once or twice a week.
Omer (48:57.710)
What's a new or crazy business idea you'd love to pursue if you had the time?
Jared Brown (49:01.470)
So yes, this one, it's out there.
It's transparent OLED windows.
So especially if you live in a city, you can turn your window into whatever landscape or picture you would really wanna see looking out that instead of the building next to you.
Omer (49:18.850)
Wow, I haven't seen those.
What a cool idea.
What's an interesting or fun fact about you that most people don't know?
Jared Brown (49:25.010)
So my hobby, when I do have a few moments of spare time, is to do sim racing.
Omer (49:30.130)
Interesting.
And finally, what's one of your most important passions outside of your work?
Jared Brown (49:35.330)
I am all about helping my kids and helping other kids at our school and in groups.
Get excited about Steam and get them into robotics, get them to do coding challenges, compete in state tech fairs, Anything it can do to help kids get excited about going into engineering.
Omer (49:54.580)
A great way to spend your time.
A worthwhile thing to do.
Love that.
Great.
So thank you so much for joining me.
It's been a pleasure talking and unpacking the story of what you and Dave and the rest of your team have done over the last, you know, 11 or 12 years.
A lot to uncover.
Would love to continue the conversation, but we only have so much time, so I hope we did justice to, to telling your story and what you guys have done.
If people want to learn more about Hubstaff, they can go to hubstaff.com and if folks want to get in touch with you, what's the best way for them to do that?
Jared Brown (50:30.590)
Yeah, they.
They email me@jared hubstaff.com It's J A R E D at Hubstaff.
Omer (50:36.720)
Awesome.
Jared, thank you so much.
It's been a pleasure and I wish you and the team the best of success.
Jared Brown (50:42.480)
Well, thank you.
It was great being on.
Omer (50:44.080)
My pleasure.
Cheers.
