60 Waitlist Signups to $2M ARR With Early Traction

Omer Khan [00:00:00]:
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 took to Lav Sernobrinya, the co founder and CEO of VacationTracker, a SaaS leave management product for small to medium businesses. In 2017, Lav and his team at Cloud Horizon, a services company he used to run, would often struggle to manage employee leave with an Excel spreadsheet.

Omer Khan [00:00:43]:
As the team grew, this manual process became more and more difficult to manage, so during a company hackathon they decided to build a software solution. They created a simple landing page and spent a bit of money on ads to see if anyone else was interested. Lav's partner also talked about the idea at conferences where he was speaking, which helped get some more people on the wait list. But months went by and Lav and his team still didn't launch the product.

Omer Khan [00:01:11]:
About nine months after they created the landing page, Lav got an email from someone who'd been on the waiting list for ages asking when they were going to launch. This was a wake up call for Lav and it made him realize the potential demand for their products. So they got to work completing the product and getting it ready for launch. Vacation Tracker launched with a six month free beta for users on the waitlist. They only had about 60 people on the list, but 20 of them signed up and 10 of them became active users.

Omer Khan [00:01:43]:
Lav would personally handle all demos and customer support and he turned on web chat on their website which gave him a chance to interact directly with a lot of customers. One day Lav was at a restaurant having lunch when he received the stripe notification. Their first paying customer had just signed up for $25 a month. It may not have been much, but it was a moment of pure joy for Lav and he celebrated by buying drinks for everyone in the restaurant. But the early days also came with plenty of challenges.

Omer Khan [00:02:14]:
At the end of the six month beta, one of the developers accidentally wiped the production database which forced the team to scramble to recover the data. The team also struggled with creating relevant content at scale. Their initial marketing efforts included articles about summer reading lists and travel destinations, which generated traffic but attracted the wrong types of visitors and leads. Fast forward to today. Vacation tracker serves 2 and a half thousand customers, has a team of about 20 people, and is approaching $2 million in annual recurring revenue, all while remaining bootstrapped.

Omer Khan [00:02:53]:
In this episode, you'll learn how Lav and his team turned a side project into a successful SaaS business by listening closely to customers needs. Why a Slack first approach helped Vacation Tracker differentiate itself in the market and reduce friction for users, how the team leveraged content marketing to drive growth and and the mistakes they made along the way.

Omer Khan [00:03:16]:
We talk about why Lav believes in the importance of founders directly engaging with customers in the early stages of a startup, and how Vacation Trackers successfully navigated the transition from a free beta period to a paid product despite some of the significant challenges they faced. So I hope you enjoy it. Lav, welcome to the show.

Lav Crnobrnja [00:03:39]:
Thanks for having me.

Omer Khan [00:03:40]:
My pleasure. Do you have a favorite quote, something that inspires or motivates you that you can share with us?

Lav Crnobrnja [00:03:45]:
So actually I was thinking a lot about that because I'm a quotes person and there's maybe two that I would like to share with you that I talk to with my team all the time. The first one is from Warren Buffett. It takes 20 years to build the reputation. It takes five minutes to ruin it.

Lav Crnobrnja [00:03:58]:
I tell them that all the time just to make sure that we're kind of on the level and that like we make sure that we don't do any reputation destroying things because it's, it's very hard to get out of it after you get into it. And then my marketing manager reminded me this morning that I also used to remind them a lot of this other quote when we were starting. And that is if you're not embarrassed of the first version of your product, you'd launch too late.

Lav Crnobrnja [00:04:18]:
That's a Reid Hoffman quote, which I love very much because I find that the teams tend to try to get to the perfect solution right away and I'm always pushing them. Just launch it, let's talk to customers and then we're going to figure out how to make it better. So I used to tell them this quote all the time just to remind them not to like, try to be too perfect with things, you know.

Omer Khan [00:04:36]:
So that is. Actually those are two great quotes and I think they're very relevant to your story. And we'll talk about this a little bit later because what you just told me instantly reminds me of dozens of conversations I've had with founders who say I can't launch too quickly because it'll jeopardize my reputation or the reputation of the product. Right. So I have to get it right before I get it out there. And you find a way to balance the two. So we'll, we'll dig into that A little bit, yeah.

Lav Crnobrnja [00:05:05]:
So here, let me just tell you really quickly because I think there's a very simple answer to that. And that's something I discovered in my first business when I was working with my first business partner. I discovered that most people care about the solution to a problem, not about how the solution looks like. So if your product is garbage looking, but it solves a problem for them, they're willing to pay for it.

Lav Crnobrnja [00:05:27]:
But if it's beautiful and perfectly designed and everything's wonderful about it, but it does not solve their problem, they will not pay for it. And so this is why it's like, it doesn't really destroy it, but you have to solve the problem. Well, if you're solving your customer's problem really well, they'll pay for it even if it looks like crap. That's been my experience by working with all those customers in my first business. And also it's been our experience now in Vacation Tracker as well.

Omer Khan [00:05:47]:
Yeah, I think that's great. And I think in many ways if, if you're solving the problem, it looks like crap and people are still buying it and paying for it. That is like a huge sign of validation that you're solving the right problem because they're willing to put up with all those other things because the problem is important enough for them to solve. Whereas a lot of people time people say, oh, yeah, yeah, this is a problem.

Omer Khan [00:06:16]:
And then you give them the solution and they're like, well, I don't want to solve it that much or that badly.

Lav Crnobrnja [00:06:20]:
It's like, exactly. I'm not willing to pay for the solution. Right. They're willing to pay when you talk to them. But when it comes down to actually forking over 20 bucks or 30 bucks or whatever the price of the product is, then it's like, I'm not so sure. So, so an ugly product that they're willing to pay for really gives you a good sense of, okay, they're getting value out of this.

Lav Crnobrnja [00:06:37]:
Even though it's ugly, they're still getting value out of it, which is a good, in my opinion, a very strong signal that you're onto something.

Omer Khan [00:06:42]:
Yeah. All right, so tell us about Vacation Tracker. What does the product do, who is it for, and what's the main problem you're helping to solve?

Lav Crnobrnja [00:06:49]:
So it's a lead management solution for small to medium businesses. It's really helping people, you know, plan better, know who's in out of the office, and get real time updates, you know, as to, like, when people are not there. It's really intended for small to medium businesses. And we built this product as we were facing this problem ourselves. In our first company, we were using Excel file, which is what most people kind of start off with, and eventually you hit a wall with this Excel file.

Lav Crnobrnja [00:07:16]:
It becomes unmanageable when you get, like, bigger than 10, 15 people. And we had this problem in our first company, and then we were like, well, we're a software company. Let's kind of build our own solution. And. And we did. But generally, it was intended initially for small to medium businesses like ours, and then it expanded to all types of organizations.

Omer Khan [00:07:36]:
Yeah, when you said that, at first it sounded like you said lead management, but it's leave management. Right.

Lav Crnobrnja [00:07:41]:
You know, leave management. So sick days, holidays, you know, like pto, maternity leave, all kinds of things like this.

Omer Khan [00:07:49]:
Great. I just want to make that clear for anybody listening. Right. That's what we're talking about. All right, Adam, give us a sense of the size of the business. Where are you in terms of revenue, number of customers, size of team?

Lav Crnobrnja [00:08:00]:
So we just crossed about 2,500 customers right now, and we just hired somebody to make the team. 20 people, and we're hitting about 2 million in annual recurring revenue, hopefully this month, maybe early next month, if all goes well.

Omer Khan [00:08:15]:
And you're bootstrapped.

Lav Crnobrnja [00:08:17]:
Yeah, we're bootstrapped. Like, we actually used the profits from our first business to start this business. We were solving our own problem, and we were using our own profits to get this business going. And now it's, like, fully standalone, and it's. It's. Yeah, we bootstrapped it from the beginning.

Omer Khan [00:08:31]:
Great. Okay, so the business has been around for about six, six and a half years. Vacation Tracker, you've been working on your. You were working on your previous business, which was a services company. So why don't we go back to around that time of 2017, 2018. Where did the. What were you doing at the time? And where did this idea for Vacation Tracker come from?

Lav Crnobrnja [00:08:54]:
So my. My partner and I always knew we wanted to do a product. Like, we started off in service because we just didn't have the funds to, you know, spend 100, 200 grand, like, on a product before we get some traction. And so basically we said, okay, let's start with services, and then we'll eventually do product. So Cloud Horizon, our first company, was starting to take off. We were getting more and more, like, clients and taking on bigger projects, and the team was expanding.

Lav Crnobrnja [00:09:18]:
At one point, we reached 35 people, and the whole time in the Back of our head, we had this, like, we got to do our own product. We're building products for other people. We were learning a bunch of stuff about it, and we're like, we want to do our own product. But, you know, we were having one successful year after another. New clients were coming in, business was growing. You know, we would have been idiots to turn some of these customers away.

Lav Crnobrnja [00:09:37]:
But we did have a hackathon internally at one point, and we decided to work on a couple of ideas, namely, some. Some problems we were having internally. And one of them was vacation, like this. This, like what I mentioned before, we had this Excel file we're breaking our heads on, and we're like, let's kind of build something that we can automate this and have a software running, like, keeping track of when people are in and out of the office. And so we built this very crude version of it for our hackathon.

Lav Crnobrnja [00:10:01]:
We built a landing page for it. You know, we spend maybe $100, $200 on some Google Ads and some Facebook ads, drew some traffic on it, got a couple of signups, and basically left it there. Then my partner did a couple of conferences because he goes around conferences and he does presentations. So as part of his conferences, in his conference presentations, he was basically saying, hey, we're building this thing. You know, if you want to sign up, we'll let you guys know when, you know, when we launch.

Lav Crnobrnja [00:10:27]:
And so a couple more email addresses came from that, and then we just kind of forgot about it. We were too busy running our first business. Until one day, I received this email from a guy who signed up on our wait list. And he's like, hey, I signed up to your wait list, like, nine months ago. Like, when are you guys gonna launch? You know, I was talking to my partner, and I was like, this guy really wants this product.

Lav Crnobrnja [00:10:47]:
He went through all this trouble to figure out who we are and who I am and get my email address and then write me this really nice email asking me about how, like, when are we gonna launch this product? Like, and we had nothing at that point, right? It was like just a landing page with, like, we're launching soon. Sign up here for us to let you into the beta, the classic kind of, you know, lean startup approach. And so I was like, we should consider building this product.

Lav Crnobrnja [00:11:09]:
And roughly at that same time, one of our customers in Cloud Horizon got acquired by a private equity firm. And the private equity firm told them, get rid of all external contractors. And so they suddenly canceled this contract. And they told us Listen, at the end of this month we gotta stop and these two guys that are working on the project, like, they're gonna have to stop. And I was like, okay, no problem.

Lav Crnobrnja [00:11:28]:
So we took these two guys and we put them to work on two different product ideas, one of which was Vacation Tracker, and the other one was actually a time tracking solution that we wanted, was specifically tailored for, you know, for, for companies like Cloud Horizon. And so we started building these two products and actually I was more, I thought that the other idea was going to be better. I was like, nobody, like, who has this problem. It's only us that has this like vacation tracking problem.

Lav Crnobrnja [00:11:51]:
This is like tiny market for this product, like the much bigger market for the time tracking solution. And so, but we said, like, okay, let's, let's, we have two guys, let's kind of start building both and then we'll see where it goes. Fast forward a couple of months. Vacation Tracker was already kind of complete and we decided to keep it very simple, like request leaves, approve leaves, and notifications, which was again, the problem we were having. The main problem we were having is people would take off to go on vacation and not notify the team.

Lav Crnobrnja [00:12:19]:
And we had teams of five, six people working on projects. One person leaves and then you need a piece of information from that person and it's like, ah, sorry, he's gone. And he's gone for two weeks. And like, we have to wait basically. So this was slowing our projects down. So one of the main features we wanted to include was a notification service to let everybody know, hey, here's who's off next week. So if you need something from them, get it this week because they're not going to be here next week.

Lav Crnobrnja [00:12:42]:
So those are the three kind of core features that we launched with.

Omer Khan [00:12:45]:
Okay, so let me ask you a couple of questions there. So two questions. One, from the time you did the hackathon and you put up this landing page to the time you got this email from this guy who really wanted Vacation Tracker, how long was that period of time where nothing really was happening? And the second part was in terms of figuring out the initial functionality, did you talk to any customers?

Lav Crnobrnja [00:13:14]:
No. So we didn't talk. We were the customer, we were building it for ourselves. Right. So that's, you know, it's one of those things, which is why we prefer to build products that kind of scratch our own itch, I suppose, because it was a problem we understood and we built it for ourselves first. And then we were like, okay, let's see if there's other people out there that experience the problem in the same way as us. And then we started talking to customers.

Lav Crnobrnja [00:13:36]:
But before I get into that, to answer your question, it was about a year from the moment we did the hackathon because it was like roughly end of year, the previous year that we did it. And then it slept basically for that whole year. And then December of the following year I got that email right as like that customer was canceling the contract. And that's why we were like, it was all happening at the same time. And we were like, okay, well this guy really wants this product.

Lav Crnobrnja [00:13:57]:
We should, we should probably, that should be one of the two products we should, we should build.

Omer Khan [00:14:00]:
You know, I mean, it's really interesting and it's like, okay, it was only one guy at the time, but for somebody to join a waiting list and nine months later, still remember they joined that waiting list and then to go through and find you, that's, that's a pretty motivated, you know, person.

Lav Crnobrnja [00:14:20]:
Exactly. And that for me was a really strong signal that like, there's probably other people out there that have the same problem that we're having and that there's not a good solution out there to address this problem. Because we were really tackling it through Slack. That was our thing. We were like, it's a Slack based leave tracking tool. And so we were like, okay, this is actually like something that maybe there's other people because this was a very different organization.

Lav Crnobrnja [00:14:40]:
I want to get into who they are, but it was like a radically different organization than the one that we were. And this guy really felt this pain, obviously quite acutely if he was willing to go through all this trouble to reach out to me. And so getting back to your second question of how we decided the features, it was really like, what's the minimum that we need here? We need to request leave and we need to approve leave.

Lav Crnobrnja [00:14:58]:
And obviously the tracking piece, you need users and you need like, you need to be able to track on their profiles, like what, you know, how many days they took off for sick leave for PTO and so forth. So really it was like the core of the system, which was a kind of user profiles. I guess I forgot to mention that part. And then the ability to request, the ability to approve.

Lav Crnobrnja [00:15:15]:
And then the other thing that we needed was a notification that goes inside Slack to let our team members know you, hey, here's who's off next week. With the idea being that if you see that somebody that's on your team is off and you need something, and you think you might need something from them? Well, reach out to that person this week. So we didn't really do much market research to start because we were really solving our own problem to start. But then when we launched, what we did was.

Lav Crnobrnja [00:15:39]:
So one other thing I should mention about our landing page was we had the pricing on it, but we scratched off the pricing. And at the time, I believe we wrote it was going to be $29 for 25 users, and then $1 per user per month after that. Along those lines, I don't remember exactly, but we put the pricing on the page and then we scratched it off and we said six months free for our beta users, right?

Lav Crnobrnja [00:16:00]:
So when we started letting those people on our mailing list, like inside into the product, we told them, you have six months free right now. You don't have to pay us anything. But what we expect in return from you guys is feedback. And very quickly they started using and they said, well, I need the ability to sync this with Google Calendar. No problem. We're going to build like the sync to Google Calendar. I need more leave types right now. The beginning was only pto. I need sick days, I need maternity leave.

Lav Crnobrnja [00:16:22]:
I need, you know, they gave us list of things they needed. Great, let's build that. I need an export function, so I need to. So I can synchronize this with my payroll system, no problem. So we started talking to our users and we really started shaping the product after we launched, not before.

Omer Khan [00:16:38]:
Okay, got it. How many people did you have on your wait list when you. When you shipped the product?

Lav Crnobrnja [00:16:45]:
So There was about 60, and we emailed all of them, and I believe about 20 of them kind of signed up. But really, out of those 20 that signed up, maybe 10 of them were actually active users.

Omer Khan [00:16:57]:
Got it. Okay. So here's what often happens when you scratch your own itch. And I can say this with confidence because I have lots of conversations with founders about this. They identify a problem, they build a solution or something for themselves, and then they say, let's go and find somebody else who has this problem. And they end up with two. Two problems that I see. Either is they. They struggle to find anybody else who has that problem because, you know, maybe.

Omer Khan [00:17:32]:
Maybe, you know, it could be anybody, and maybe they're not talking to the right people or the right types of companies or whatever, or they find people who have the problem, but it's not painful enough. So there's no. There's no real strong desire for them to shift. And in this Case. You know, I could imagine some companies saying, oh, yeah, I want this. And then you say, okay, pay up. And they're like, well, my spreadsheet isn't that bad. You know, it kind of gets the job done. Right.

Omer Khan [00:17:59]:
What was your experience of going through that journey?

Lav Crnobrnja [00:18:03]:
I don't think it's like, it's quite a pain and you lose accuracy. And this is kind of an important problem in the sense that, like, vacation tracking in and of itself might not be as important as the part that correlates to the payroll, because a lot of people get paid based on vacation, and then there's vacation pay, and then if there's unused vacations and all of that stuff. So it's not just like keeping track of who's in and out of the office. There's a second component to it that relates to payroll. Right.

Lav Crnobrnja [00:18:28]:
And so this is why I think this problem is a little bit more acute, because if there's accuracy issues there, then you're not paying people properly. And that's kind of the worst thing, in my opinion, that you can do in a business is underpay or overpay people. You should be paying them fairly. Right. For. For the amount of time that they've been working.

Omer Khan [00:18:42]:
Right. But you weren't solving payroll at that time.

Lav Crnobrnja [00:18:46]:
No, we weren't. We didn't even realize this was a problem initially. Right. We only figured it out afterwards, you know.

Omer Khan [00:18:51]:
Okay, okay, got it. So, but even though you weren't solving the payroll piece of that, being able to provide your customers with a more accurate way of managing this information still kind of indirectly was helping them solve that problem. Is that. Is that how you discovered one of the drivers for them to want to buy the product?

Lav Crnobrnja [00:19:15]:
Yeah, so exactly. We were talking to them, and very quickly we realized that vacation correlates to payroll, which was not something that we were thinking about initially. And that's, like I mentioned, the export feature. That was one of the main reasons why people were asking us for the export feature, and many people were asking for this feature. So we were like, okay, this is clearly something important for our customers. We should kind of zero in on this and develop the product in this direction, because accuracy is something clear that's important to them.

Lav Crnobrnja [00:19:41]:
The other part of it is, like, you're right. We weren't sure that this was an important problem, but that guy doing this whole maneuver to fit that gave us a strong indication that maybe this is a bigger problem than we initially anticipated.

Omer Khan [00:19:53]:
Yeah. Okay, great. So you didn't have a massive list but even getting 10 fairly active users who are willing to provide you feedback at that early stage is super valuable. What happened at the end of the six months when you asked people to stop paying?

Lav Crnobrnja [00:20:19]:
So the first thing that happened right as the six months were kind of expiring was that our only developer who was working on the project cleared or wiped the production database. And we joke that he became a senior when that happened. We were like, you became a senior? And we scrambled. We somehow managed to recover it. And then we put better procedures and all this because we're kind of just go, go, go, scrambling, building, not really thinking about doing things properly again.

Lav Crnobrnja [00:20:49]:
This whole quote about not, you know, being embarrassed about the first version of your product was coming in all the time. And so we extended everybody. We apologized, we fixed the problem. We extended everybody a month, and then we were waiting, right? And so our goal was to just get one paying customer. We were still, remember at that time, we were still like, the first business was, like, eating up most of our time. This was kind of this, like, little side hustle that we were doing on the side.

Lav Crnobrnja [00:21:12]:
We weren't even, like, putting too much mental bandwidth on it, you know, but we were obviously, like, trying to get it to work. And I remember I was sitting in Belgrade at the time and having, like, a lunch with the team and. And I got the notification, the stripe notification, the first $25. And that was like the happiest moment of my life up until I hadn't had my kid yet.

Lav Crnobrnja [00:21:32]:
So I was like, at the happiest moment of my life up until that point, that first $25, because many people that did this told me it was going to be brutally difficult to get that first customer to fork over, you know, the first 25, or whatever the price of your product is. And so I remember sitting. I remember clearly sitting in that restaurant and getting this notification and being like, rakija for everybody. I spent way More than $25 Getting a drink for everybody in that restaurant.

Lav Crnobrnja [00:21:56]:
But I was so excited that we made this first $25, and then very rapidly after. And like, you know, it's. Maybe I don't even have a clear answer why. I think it was because we were listening to our customers. Like, actually, one of the things that I can say that contributed a lot towards these paying customers starting, like, to kind of start paying us, like, after those first six months is that we installed the web chat very early on. Like, we had that little bubble that you can. You can chat with us.

Lav Crnobrnja [00:22:26]:
My partner was against this. He's like, you're crazy. We're going to get a bunch of spam and people telling. I'm like, no, no, no, no, I'm going to handle this. We got to talk to our customers. The only way that they're going to talk to us if they see this little bubble, I'll handle it. Don't worry. Like, you don't need to worry about this. I'll be the one chatting with them. And so I was the one doing all the chats and talking with them.

Lav Crnobrnja [00:22:43]:
And I think this helped a lot because they understood that they were talking to one of the founders. I was really trying to understand their problems as I was talking to them. I was even jumping on calls with them. They were showing me things. I was also doing demos at the time I started kind of like, okay, let's jump on a quick call. I'll do a demo for you.

Lav Crnobrnja [00:22:58]:
And so I was demoing the product for them, and during the demos, I was asking them a lot of questions about, okay, what's the problem that you're having? What are you using right now? Why do you feel that this is not a good solution for you right now? So I was asking them all these questions as I was doing demos. And this was really a great learning opportunity for us, taking really good notes, then typing all these notes up and putting them in our confluence. And so a lot of our team was looking at it.

Lav Crnobrnja [00:23:21]:
So I think this was a big contributor towards why people were willing to pay for our product because we were very quickly adding the things that they were wanting. And then they would come to us and ask for something else. And we were like, okay, give me until, like, I don't know, November and I'll have that ready for you. But because I already told you that I'm going to launch this thing in September, and we launched it in September. We had some credibility with them that we're actually going to deliver on these things.

Lav Crnobrnja [00:23:42]:
And I think, you know, one of the questions that you asked me earlier was like, the differentiation. One of the things that I think differentiates our product from the others is that it's chat first, if I can say it like that. Remember, like a while back when Mobile came and it was like, build Mobile first. Well, we built Chat first. You know, it was like Slack first. We really built the product around Slack, which other people did not do. Other people build the product and then they built the Slack integration.

Lav Crnobrnja [00:24:08]:
We built the Slack integration, and then we were thinking about the product from the other direction and the reason for that is because at the time our team was using a bunch of different tools. Jira, Confluence, BitBucket, like time tracking tools. They have to remember all these logins and passwords and we didn't want them to have to remember another login and password for another website which they were going to use a couple of times per year.

Lav Crnobrnja [00:24:29]:
So the idea was, let's build this in Slack, because we're using Slack all the time and we should be able to do 90% of day to day stuff inside Slack. So let's start by thinking about this product, Slack first, and then we're gonna build all the other things that need to integrate into it afterwards. And so I think this is what really differentiated us and this is why customers liked our product because they wanted something like us inside Slack.

Lav Crnobrnja [00:24:49]:
At the time it was only Slack and they wanted something that was directly inside Slack, easy to manage. People don't have to leave, they don't have to remember another login, have to reset passwords all the time. It's like you do slash, vacation, you do your business inside Slack and that's it. You don't have to get out of Slack almost, almost ever. Right? So this is what I think was the reason why people started kind of taking on the product initially.

Omer Khan [00:25:08]:
So I think there's a few things you said that I want to just recap because I think this is really valuable for, for founders who are in those early stages where they've got a product and maybe, you know, they're struggling with differentiation or convincing customers to buy. And there was three things that I heard and from my own personal experience as well, when I'm more likely to start paying for a product with very little effort, very little convincing. It's these types of things.

Omer Khan [00:25:39]:
So the first one was like being able to talk to the founder and this interaction and to know that you're talking to somebody who cares, who's listening and who can actually do something about your feedback. Right. Like a number of times I've written detailed feedback for some, some product and a customer support rep says, thanks, I'll let the product team know. And you know, nothing's ever going to happen with that versus when you talk to the founder and they're like, you know what? I like that I got to do something about it.

Omer Khan [00:26:12]:
So that's number one. Number two, we already talked about, and you stated this pretty early on, solving a problem and doing it better than what they can do today. And it doesn't necessarily have to be like, you know, the most beautiful, elegant, solution, but you're solving it well. And then the third thing I think is iterating fast. When people see not only that their feedback is being heard, but they keep seeing new improvements and, and just incrementally, it just seems to be getting better and better.

Omer Khan [00:26:42]:
You get this thing like this, there's this momentum, there's this energy. This thing is going somewhere and it's getting better and better. And probably if I don't stop paying now, they're going to charge me five or 10 times more in a year's time, so I might as well get on the train today, right?

Lav Crnobrnja [00:26:57]:
Yeah, exactly, exactly. I think that when they find value in it, and like you said, they're talking to their founder and they feel that things are moving. This is part of the reason why we have the changelog linked to the dashboard, so they can easily click on it and see all the stuff we're releasing regularly and stuff, so they can see there's motion happening. That we didn't just build this and kind of leave it there. I think all those things make a big difference. But I gotta tell you, we weren't actively thinking about this stuff.

Lav Crnobrnja [00:27:21]:
Maybe it's because we're a little bit more experienced as entrepreneurs and we saw like through our customers, we were observing a lot. Like a lot of the customers that we had in Cloud Horizon who were building SaaS products, we were observing and maybe we subconsciously picked up on some of these things. But I have to say, I have to be perfectly honest, not like we were like, we have to be consciously thinking about this. It's just kind of came intuitively for us. And I'm guessing it's because of our previous experiences.

Omer Khan [00:27:44]:
Yeah. So getting to the first 10 customers, were you able to do that from that email list of 60 people, or did you have to generate more leads to get to the first 10?

Lav Crnobrnja [00:27:55]:
So I think we, you know, because it wasn't just like we were continuously having people because that page was there for a year, I guess that kind of helped us a little bit. So, like it was indexed by Google and people were finding us. So names kept coming into the list. Not many, but a few were kind of coming in here and there and we would kind of onboard them and talk to them, like, and give demos to them and so forth.

Lav Crnobrnja [00:28:16]:
And so for the first 10 customers, I would say it was probably that mailing list. My co founder is an AWS serverless hero, so I have a very strong technical co founder who's also like relatively well known in the serverless community. And so he gets invited to a lot of conferences and because the product is built using serverless, and then he's talking about serverless. He was always using the product as an example in his presentations, right? So we were every.

Lav Crnobrnja [00:28:42]:
After every present, like every conference that he would go to, we would get a handful of new signups, right? Some of these people that were there at the presentation, I guess their teams were like having similar problems using the Excel file. And so we'd get a couple of signups and those were much stronger leads because my co founder has this credibility, right? And so, like, when he talks about it and they kind of understand the technical background, I feel that those leads were much stronger leads.

Lav Crnobrnja [00:29:07]:
They took us a lot more seriously from the start than somebody who just googled us and found us on the Internet.

Omer Khan [00:29:11]:
But, but don't you think that there's also a. A potential risk, like people who, people just come, you know, here is talk and they're interested in serverless and they sign up and it's just more about looking at how the product works rather than actually wanting to pay for it to track believe and stuff like that. Did that. Was that kind of. Were you attracting those type of people as well?

Lav Crnobrnja [00:29:36]:
I don't find that we. That we were. I mean, maybe there's a few people that kind of signed up. I mean, we didn't convert all those people that signed up to our wait list. So obviously some of them probably signed up to check out the product. But all the ones that I spoke to, there's a couple that come to mind. They were all like, yeah, we saw your partner talk at the Rain. It was very interesting. And I thought that how you guys build the product is very interesting. And your hosting.

Lav Crnobrnja [00:29:58]:
Our hosting costs, we have over 100,000 users. We pay $1,000 a month for our hosting, which is nothing. It's peanuts, right? But that's because we're using serverless. So he drills that point a lot in his presentations. And so people find that fascinating. And then I guess it just again, like the people I spoke to, it wasn't because they were looking at how the product works. They were just like, oh, this seems interesting and we have this problem and let's connect these two. Right?

Lav Crnobrnja [00:30:21]:
That was kind of like, so that's probably for our first 10 customers, it was heavily based on that. And so I'm not sure how that's how helpful that is to others. It's, I think, more interesting how we went from 100 to 1000. Sorry. To from 10 to 1000. That's where we weren't leveraging so much. My partner's like, credibility and all that. It was.

Omer Khan [00:30:39]:
Well, let's talk about that. Because you. At this point, many founders start thinking about, okay, what does my marketing look like? What channels should I focus on? Should I do content marketing, Should I send cold emails, Should I do ads, Should I do whatever, right? And there's a whole bunch of experimentation or just trial and error that goes into it. You guys took a different approach.

Lav Crnobrnja [00:31:05]:
We did. So the way we did it was because this was such a, like a lab project, like inside of our existing company. It wasn't even a separate company yet. Like, it was kind of a one guy inside of Cloud Horizon working on this with us kind of part time jumping in. And so we were like, how are we gonna market this? And this was maybe like a month before the six months free was expiring for everybody. And so basically we're like, what are we gonna do?

Lav Crnobrnja [00:31:31]:
And then it just so happens that within our network we found out that the former chief, like we were able to get in touch with the former chief marketing officer of toggl, which was the time tracker we were using at the time, and it was a very successful time tracker, was the main one in the market. Now I think Clockify has become bigger than Toggl. But at the time, TOGGL was the time tracker. So we're like, okay, they were very successful. They had a lot of good marketing initiatives. Let's try to talk to her.

Lav Crnobrnja [00:31:55]:
So we spoke to her and she was interested to work with us. And basically we hired her to develop a marketing plan and strategy for us for the first two years because we knew we weren't going to be able to afford on our little shoestring budget that we had. We knew we weren't going to be able to afford, like a serious marketer like her. We're going to have to hire somebody a little bit more junior and probably this person's not really going to know what they're supposed to do.

Lav Crnobrnja [00:32:17]:
So maybe it makes sense that we hire this person to write the plan for us and kind of come up with what we're going to do over the first two years and then hire the junior person more for the execution of the plan. And that's exactly what we did. And the plan was heavily focused on content because TOGGL really grew mainly because of all the content that they were doing.

Lav Crnobrnja [00:32:35]:
And so I remember in the beginning, I don't remember the entire plan, but one of the Things was like publish five articles per week, like one per basically per weekday for the first year. Because in the first year or two, like Google's not really taking your site seriously. Like, you know, there's this whole domain authority issue and so forth but you know, they want to see consistency, they want to see quality content. So just keep publishing. And so that's what we did.

Lav Crnobrnja [00:32:58]:
We were literally publishing one article, one article per weekday for like a year straight. And that was, and it wasn't just like the articles we had like landing pages. We were focused on specific keywords. We did do some keyword research, but really it was like figuring out what the pain point of our customer is and then trying to lead them towards Vacation Tracker as the solution. One of the challenges that we ran into initially in our marketing efforts was most people didn't know that you could do this inside Slack.

Lav Crnobrnja [00:33:31]:
So if they're looking for a solution, they're looking for a leave tracker. But the really slick part of the product was the fact that it integrated with Slack, which most people had no clue that you can do this inside Slack. So like now I think more and more people are aware that you can do this kind of stuff inside Slack and Microsoft Teams.

Lav Crnobrnja [00:33:46]:
But before apps were just kind of starting and, and so like a big challenge for us was like, hey, you should connect your Slack because it's, and it's the only way that you can sign up for this product actually is if you're using Slack. But that was kind of a challenge for us in marketing, was kind of explaining to them like, hey, you should do this inside Slack because it's going to make your life so much easier. User management logins, there's so many advantages to using it in Slack, but people just didn't know.

Omer Khan [00:34:10]:
Okay, so I want to talk about more about this marketing strategy and plan because this was the one thing that you just focused on and executed and which drove 90% of your leads, your, your, your, your sales for and ultimately got you to seven figures.

Lav Crnobrnja [00:34:26]:
Yeah. And I mean to this day it's our best channel. It's not eating, it's not contributing as much as it did in the first two years. But to this day, content is our best channel, hands down.

Omer Khan [00:34:36]:
So I mean, it sounds like this CMO from Toggl, I mean, she didn't have a crystal ball that she could just look at your business and figure out, okay, these are the channels you should go after or whatever. It sounds more like she took the Playbook from what Toggle had done and adapted it to how you could use it for your business. And at the same time, you guys made the bet that this is the one thing we're going to focus on.

Omer Khan [00:35:04]:
And if we execute and do this right, it may take 3 months, 6 months, 12 months, but eventually we're going to start to get payback and returns on this, this, this effort we're going to put into this. Exactly how did you figure out what to what type of content to create? Because at that point, you're still not that super clear about who your ICP is.

Lav Crnobrnja [00:35:30]:
We had no idea who icp we thought our ICP was. Companies like Cloud Horizon, basically. I mean, we had a sense that there's others out there because of that guy that I mentioned before who reached out to us. But really most of the companies that were signing up were technology companies. So we were like, okay, it's like little tech teams like ours that are the icp.

Lav Crnobrnja [00:35:47]:
So for the longest time we thought that we only actually discovered our ICP maybe two years, like dove in and discovered what the ICP is in detail about two years ago. But for the longest time we were like thinking that our ICP is just small tech companies and small tech teams like ours. But how did we decide to place this bet, really?

Lav Crnobrnja [00:36:07]:
You know, we were consumers also of different products, you know, and we also had customers in our first company, which we were building this type of product for, maybe not necessarily in the HR space, but different products, like for different industries. And we saw that content was working very well. Some of the products that we were using we discovered through the content they were publishing.

Lav Crnobrnja [00:36:27]:
So when she came and she said, like, I think you guys should do content, because that worked really well for us in Toggle, I didn't doubt that this could probably work very well for us as well. And then we said, okay. And also the other part of it is we just didn't have this huge budget. So we felt that trying to experiment Google Ads, you can get killed with Google Ads, right? There's tens of thousands of dollars.

Lav Crnobrnja [00:36:51]:
And I know people that got killed because Google just likes to spend money on ads and they're going to max out your budget very quickly. And so we just didn't have the funds to invest in these fancy initiatives. We had to keep it relatively simple and content was not very expensive for us to produce. Now, to answer your question about how do we decide what content, she helped us, like, as part of the strategy, she kind of identified some good keywords for us to focus on.

Lav Crnobrnja [00:37:15]:
Some good content that she thought was relevant for the people that she thought was, like, you know, she thought, at the time, thought were our icp. And we very strongly, like, very strictly followed that playbook. We didn't deviate much from it in the first two years. And so, like. But actually what we discovered was that we need to have, like, much more specific content for our, you know, for our audience. So initially, like, we published all types of content, things that I think that maybe are not necessarily so relevant to our audience.

Lav Crnobrnja [00:37:48]:
Things like books that I read over the summer, or, like, destinations to visit in former Yugoslavia, because our team is from Serbia. And then we discovered that we're attracting all this traffic that didn't really care about our product. They're, like, caring more about destinations that they want to visit. Yeah, they, like. So it's like, hang on a second. Like, yes, we're driving traffic, which is a vanity metric. Wonderful. Yay. Traffic grew 50%, but signups are, like, flat. Right. So it's like, clearly we're not doing the right thing here.

Lav Crnobrnja [00:38:13]:
Luckily, we discovered that relatively quickly, but, you know, and then we started publishing more specific content. But it took us a little while to learn this lesson and even, like, to write very specific content. It took us quite a while to, like, to figure out, like, the real problems that our customers are facing and then to, like, write about those problems.

Omer Khan [00:38:33]:
So give me an example. So we talked about this really broad articles which were attracting the wrong types of customers. And then you said you got a little bit more focus, and then it took even longer to get really specific. So what were the. Give me a couple of examples of what that type of content looked like.

Lav Crnobrnja [00:38:53]:
So, you know, we started writing more about, like, the product itself and the things that the product does rather than about vacation tracking or vacations broadly. Right. And so, like, but. But even that wasn't really, like, I'm trying to think. I can't remember. It was a while ago. These, like, these. I can tell you what we're writing about right now, which is very specific and very targeted for our audience. And it's like, I'll use accruals as an example. So, like, some companies accrue leave or PTO for their. For their employees.

Lav Crnobrnja [00:39:21]:
Actually, in Canada, it's a law that you have to accrue leave. Our company doesn't do it. A lot of companies don't do it. But it's kind of technically you're supposed to, like, accrue leave. And so, like, there's so many different ways to do it. And so right now we're writing articles that explain, like, weekly accruals, like monthly accruals, payouts, like, you know, how payouts for accruals work. What happens, like, if somebody accrues and then leaves your company? Like this kind of stuff.

Lav Crnobrnja [00:39:47]:
Like stuff that's very specific type of problems that they may face if they need to accrue, leave for their employees. And then it's like, well, if you need to accrue and if you need to do it accurately, you should use Vacation Tracker. Right. So we tie it in then with the product, but it's really like talking about specific problems. And then we have a feature inside of the product which addresses that particular problem. And then we try to tie that in into the content as well. That's something that we're doing a lot more these days.

Lav Crnobrnja [00:40:13]:
Whereas before we weren't even mentioning the product inside of the posts. Right. And we don't always mention it still. Sometimes we talk about, like, maternity leave broadly. We explain, you know, we write comparison articles about maternity leaves in different countries and so forth. So we do publish some. Some content like that, which is more tailored for, like, HR managers, which are kind of our audience.

Lav Crnobrnja [00:40:34]:
And, you know, we don't necessarily just publish content right now that's like kind of that last mile sell, meaning, like, I have this problem and I'm looking for a solution and need it. Like, right now, we also publish content with the idea that, okay, you're gonna read about a problem that you're having. You may not necessarily be ready to buy Vacation Tracker today, or your company might not necessarily be like the ideal customer for Vacation Tracker, but you may switch jobs because people switch jobs every couple of years. And we want you to remember us.

Lav Crnobrnja [00:41:03]:
And when you go to your next company and you're having this problem, we want you to be. We want Vacation Tracker to be the first person you think of. Right. And so this is the other part of the strategy that we're doing now. And that's more kind of nurturing our leads over the long term, which we weren't doing at all before. But I don't think that's something people should do initially.

Lav Crnobrnja [00:41:19]:
That's something you do a little bit later on when you're more established and you have a larger marketing team that you can focus on both, like, the stuff that's kind of immediate, that's gonna draw an audience immediately and like, or customers immediately and then stuff that's gonna nurture these leads over time.

Omer Khan [00:41:33]:
Okay, so I wanna unpack that a little bit and let's think about founders like Lav who are out there right now, who are writing articles about the books they're reading this summer and attracting the wrong type of customers or organic search traffic. Now, what it sounds like what happened with you was as you learn more about your customers, you built a better product with more specific features. Like you said, the helping them solve the payroll issue, helping them solve accruals, and so on.

Omer Khan [00:42:11]:
And so customers were educating you in some sense of what they needed from the product. You were building that into the product, which was then giving you more detailed understanding of your customers problems that you could write about. And then as you wrote about those problems, you could point back to the product and say, this is how we solve those problems. Beautiful, right? But when you're in the early stages, you don't have that information. You don't have the nuance and the details of all these customer problems.

Omer Khan [00:42:37]:
Your product doesn't even have the features to solve those problems yet because you haven't built those features yet. So if you were back in that situation, what do you think you might have done differently to get to where you are now, faster, Even if you, you know, didn't have all of that stuff built in your product?

Lav Crnobrnja [00:43:00]:
That's, that's a, you know, it's always hard to answer those what would you do differently? Questions with, you know, with the experience that I have now, like, I think I spoke a lot to customers, but. And I was asking them questions, but I'm not sure that I was asking them the right questions to lead me to these types of problems that they're having. Like, I was talking more broadly, but I wasn't zeroing in. Like, they would tell me, I'm solving this problem. I'm breaking my head on this Excel file. I need to automate it.

Lav Crnobrnja [00:43:24]:
And I wouldn't drill into that. You know what I mean? I wouldn't ask the way you're drilling in, like, oh, wait, you said that right now. Let me unpack that. I was like, okay, they're breaking their head on the Excel file, right? So I didn't understand at that stage how important, like, articulating the problem back to the customer is. And also another thing that we're doing now that I'm actually, like, pushing our marketing team to do even more now is like, using the customer's own words.

Lav Crnobrnja [00:43:49]:
Like, we did a bunch of surveys, we record, like, demos and setup calls that we do with customers. So we have all the words that they use, we have the language that they use, you know, and we don't use it. You know, I was just looking at our homepage, and I'm like, how many of our customers use the word outdated spreadsheets to describe their problem? You know, and like, that's right on our.

Omer Khan [00:44:06]:
Like.

Lav Crnobrnja [00:44:07]:
And that's a problem I have right now. I'm telling you, like. And I'm like, guys, we should use the language that our customers are using. Right? That's something I didn't even pay attention to initially. It's something I'm starting to pay attention to, like, in the last year or two. But it's like, to answer your question, it's like, I would really try to unpack the problem and really try to understand the nuances of the problem rather than, okay, that's the problem. Problem that they're having. Got it. And move on to the next thing.

Lav Crnobrnja [00:44:29]:
There's a lot of nuance around these problems. And, like, figuring out how to understand it very well, I think is going to help you explain that to your. Like, explain back to the customer why your solution is the right solution, you know, and then. And using it in their own words, too, because you may have the words in your head for what the right solution is, but your customers have probably a very different way of expressing the same problem. Right.

Lav Crnobrnja [00:44:53]:
And so if you can figure out how to articulate that problem back to them in their own words, it's going to resonate with them much better than if you try to articulate it to them in your own words.

Omer Khan [00:45:01]:
Love that. Love it. Love it. Yeah. And yeah, I think it's. So the two things were. Number one is keep drilling down into the problem. Automating a spreadsheet is not the problem. That's what they think is the solution to their problem. And it's almost like asking, like, I mean, you wouldn't say this to them, but really what you're saying is when they say, I have this problem with automating spreadsheets, so what? Right. Well, I can't do this. So what? Well, I can't do that.

Omer Khan [00:45:30]:
And then you keep drilling down and peeling back layers of the onion until you get to what the real. The real problem with pain is. And then, as you said, once you can articulate it back to them that you understand their problem and you're using their words and their terminology, their expressions. That's when people are like, he gets it. Like, you might not even have the product and it's still like, he can solve my problem.

Lav Crnobrnja [00:45:53]:
Exactly. Because people don't buy products. They buy solutions to problems they have pains and you want, like, I don't want to have this pain anymore. Give me something that I can pay for that I don't have this pain anymore. That's what they're looking for. They're not, they don't care about your fancy, like, features and all this stuff. They want to know, I have this problem and your product is going to solve my problem. And I'm going to spend this much less time per week dealing with this because your product solves it for me.

Lav Crnobrnja [00:46:16]:
That's, that's what they're looking for. And so this is why I feel it's so important to really understand their problem so you can articulate it back to them.

Omer Khan [00:46:22]:
So that got you just by executing this strategy and obviously it didn't happen overnight. But you, you, you stuck to the plan. You're publishing this content regularly. You're getting more and more targeted with the content and eventually it starts to pay off. You're getting more, you know, organic search traffic. You're getting more. Right. Types of customers. You're converting them the other way that you told me that you were acquiring customers. Probably not as much, but maybe the 10% was through the App Store.

Omer Khan [00:46:58]:
So we're talking about Slack and then now I think you support Microsoft Teams as well.

Lav Crnobrnja [00:47:02]:
Yeah, and Google Workspaces and we have email. So we are on all three of those Google Workspaces as an App Store as well. Microsoft Teams is an App Store and Slack as an App Store. So I would say that that's, yeah, probably our second best channel are the App Stores.

Omer Khan [00:47:15]:
Do you, have you struggled to get discovered in there or has it been fairly easy? I mean, like, you know, there's one step in terms of actually getting, you know, listed in these App Stores. But then the second thing is, okay, how, how easy or hard is it for people to find you?

Lav Crnobrnja [00:47:35]:
So, yeah, it's a good question. Initially we were just putting whatever on the page and we were trying to describe the product. But then we disc, there's best practices in how you make your listings. There's also ways that you can talk to Microsoft and you can talk to Slack and get featured in different sections. So this is all the stuff that we were doing. We were actually like trying so hard with Slack. Now we're actually in the brilliant bot section and in like a HR section.

Lav Crnobrnja [00:47:58]:
So we're in a couple of sections besides just, you know, you're browsing through the entire App Store. So that definitely helped getting put into these sections. We were featured at one point that gave us a Little boost. Boost as well. So it's not just like, put up your stuff in the App Store and they'll come, you know, there's also some work to be done there, optimizing your listings. There's best practices again, and it's different from Slack than it is for Microsoft Teams because different types of companies go with Slack than would go with Teams.

Lav Crnobrnja [00:48:23]:
So how you present your product in the Microsoft Teams Store is very different than the Slack Store. You'll notice that I'm not really talking about the Google Store because it doesn't really drive them. Any signups for us, we're there. It does send us a sign up here and there. But I don't really find people look for Google integrations through like the Google App Store. They just go on a product, they see it's there, they see the Google Login and they click login with Google. Right?

Lav Crnobrnja [00:48:44]:
So I don't think they're really searching for it through the Google App Store. So that hasn't been a significant driver of signups for us. But Teams and Slack App Stores definitely have been. And we did spend quite a bit of time over the years, you know, optimizing, like the listing, the wording we're using, the pictures that we're, how we're presenting the product and the pictures. And then we spoke to Microsoft as well. Actually, I find that Microsoft is super helpful when it comes to this.

Lav Crnobrnja [00:49:10]:
They're very willing to help you if you want to talk to them. And so there's a lot of people that are willing to help you optimize your listings. And if you're willing to work with them, they can even put you in presentations and stuff. So actually, Microsoft's been a lot more helpful than Slack, to be honest with you, when it comes to this stuff. But Slack too, you just have to be persistent with Slack just to keep going, going. Eventually somebody's going to, you know, hey, okay, yes, I got your eighth email.

Lav Crnobrnja [00:49:35]:
Let me see what I can do to help you. You know, but you got to keep going because, you know, they didn't answer our first, second, maybe even third email when we were trying to reach out to them.

Omer Khan [00:49:43]:
Now, a lot of people try to build or make the transition from a services to a product business. And it wasn't, you know, an overnight thing for you guys, but there is something really special about selling a product. And as we saw from your example of how you celebrated that first $25. Right. It's just a very special thing. How long did it take you to get to that first million in ARR. And what happened with the services business in terms of, you know, kind of trends transitioning from one to the other.

Lav Crnobrnja [00:50:25]:
So I have a bit of a unique story there. I was actually going through a divorce right as all this stuff was happening and I had like a one year old child that I had to like be, you know, taken care of on a half time basis because we had split custody. So I was having a really hard time managing both of the businesses. Probably Vacation Tracker could have grown a little bit faster if I was able to dedicate more time to it, but I was just all over the place.

Lav Crnobrnja [00:50:51]:
I was trying to run the services business and that was kind of generating most of the revenue at the time. So I had to like keep focused on that because that was basically fine. Like we were starting to have revenue in Vacation Tracker but not enough like to kind of pay for itself. So the gap was being covered by the revenue that was coming from the first business. And so I was having a really hard time.

Lav Crnobrnja [00:51:11]:
And then I decided to step down as CEO of the first company so I can focus on Vacation Tracker because I felt that the future was here. It's something my partner and I always wanted to do. And even though this was the cash generating machine, like I felt that the long term was here and that I, if I wanted this to really work, I needed to like fully focus or focus as much as 80% of my time on this. Rather than 80% on COT Horizon and 20% on vacation tracker. I needed to flip those two.

Lav Crnobrnja [00:51:36]:
I found somebody, actually I wouldn't find somebody who was already in the company, was the general manager of a survey office and he took over as CEO from the company. For me, that made it a little bit easier for me to be able to focus more on Vacation Tracker. And that's where I think that things really started to start. It started to take off more because before that we were just kind of, it was more of a side hustle. And you know, while we saw traction, we were very excited about it.

Lav Crnobrnja [00:52:02]:
You know, the big money was coming in from the other business and it was hard for us to justify spending crazy amounts of time on this, on this little project where we're generating 5k in revenue, meanwhile the other business is generating 200,000 in revenue and I'm gonna like drop that and focus on this. Like it kind of didn't make sense at the time. And so like, obviously we're gonna prioritize this one. But I realized that the long, long term I wanted to Focus more on this. So I found, like, somebody to replace me.

Lav Crnobrnja [00:52:25]:
He replaced me. We did a good transition period. He was very good. Like, you know, he took over for me. And then Covid hit, by the way. That was, like, he took over from me and then bam. Covid hits. And it made it very difficult, like, for that first business. The second business was like, you know, Vacation Tracker was kind of taking off during. During COVID And so I was able to focus more on Vacation Tracker. My partner was still kind of between both businesses.

Lav Crnobrnja [00:52:49]:
And when I was able to start spending more time during the day on talking to customers, on, like, you know, looking at our marketing initiatives, on, like, figuring out which features, like, we were going to build because we didn't have a product manager at the time, you know, that really helped us to start, like, acquiring more customers and converting more customers and acquiring bigger customers as well, because I was talking to more people and they were taking us more seriously.

Lav Crnobrnja [00:53:15]:
And then over time, we realized that when Vacation Tracker grew big enough, we realized that we didn't really want to continue in the other business because it was just too demanding. And we just, you know, we just. To be honest with you, I just didn't like that business. I just, you know, I just. I had a lot of, like, you know, battle wounds, if I can say it like that, from.

Lav Crnobrnja [00:53:34]:
From being in that business, including, like, part of the reason why I got divorced was because I was so committed to that business, you know, and so there was a lot of stuff that I just wanted to leave behind there, you know, like that I just. I needed a fresh start. I needed something new to, like, really, like, you know, take on. And this was Vacation Tracker. And I really, like, dove into it headfirst.

Lav Crnobrnja [00:53:52]:
And I believe a part of my exit from, like, the personal problems that I was having was just like, burying myself in my work and working like crazy and figuring out all this stuff and reading everything that I could about SaaS businesses and how to, you know, pricing and like, financing. And although we never raised money, but I was just interested in how to run finance, you know, like, background. My background is in finance, but.

Lav Crnobrnja [00:54:12]:
But, you know, running a service business and doing finance for a service business versus doing one for, like, for a SaaS business, you know, it's a bit different. So I was like, learning about this kind of stuff. So this is where I really felt that the business started. Taking off is when I started being. To commit more fully to it.

Omer Khan [00:54:27]:
Yeah. So what's happened with the service business now? Have you completely exited from it. You still own part of the business or.

Lav Crnobrnja [00:54:33]:
Yeah, so. So no, we, we shut it down. We, we tried to sell it at one point and that didn't work out. And then when that didn't work out, the person that was, you know, that was CEO of the company, he decided he wanted to leave. And then the option was like, Dwight, do we come back, you know, and try to like, revive the business? I don't think so. Vacation Tracker is doing really well. And so we didn't want to do that. Do we hire somebody new? But then we have to onboard this person.

Lav Crnobrnja [00:55:00]:
We have to train them. We didn't have anybody in the company that can do this. And my, you know, I got remarried after like my, you know, my third got divorced, so my second wife was pregnant with our, with my second child at the time. And I was like, I can't do this. I got two kids now. Like, I just, no, I can't do this. So we just made the decision to like wind the business down. And I mean, it was, it was still generating cash for us.

Lav Crnobrnja [00:55:22]:
So it was like, you know, we're gonna have to. Gonna see how we're gonna make this work. We're gonna have to cut our salaries a little bit and, you know, just to be able to like, keep Vacation Tracker, you know, profitable. And, you know, I have a very simple rule. Let's spend less than we earn. I know it sounds crazy because people spend way more than like, I know it's. People are like, are you crazy when I tell them that.

Lav Crnobrnja [00:55:41]:
But actually it's very simple rule that's kept us alive in both businesses is like, we're always trying to spend less than we earn, you know, so we have to cut our salaries a little bit, have to like, reduce some expenses, have to reorganize things. And then we went off just through Vacation Tracker, and when we were both able to focus 100%, that's when things like, again started taking off even more, you know. So I don't know if that answers your question.

Lav Crnobrnja [00:56:04]:
It's a little bit more of a personal story because I was dealing with a lot of stuff personally at the time. But yeah, maybe there's others that have. They're dealing in similar situations. And if there are, you can get through it. Believe me, there's a light at the end of that tunnel.

Omer Khan [00:56:20]:
Yeah. All right. Yeah. I mean, it's a great story. I love how just this whole business of that one guy harassing you for the product, that was kind of the wake up call to just set you off in this new direction with this business. I love that. We should wrap up though. Let's get into the lightning round. So I've got seven quick fire questions for you. What's one of the best pieces of business advice you've received?

Lav Crnobrnja [00:56:49]:
So when I was still working at General Electric, before we started the first company, I wrote a business plan for the first company and I sent it to the most experienced business person that I know. And I remember very clearly one of the pieces of advice he gave me. He said, you're trying to focus on quality and price at the same time, which is impossible. You should be aware that there's two types of people in this world. There's quality sensitive people and there's price sensitive people.

Lav Crnobrnja [00:57:12]:
And my advice to you is to focus on the quality sensitive people because there's always going to be somebody cheaper than you. And if you're trying to compete on price, it's going to be a race to the bottom every single time. He's like, what I would do is I would focus on the quality sensitive people, build a quality product, build a quality service, and then target those people that are willing to pay for that. And I've kind of always kept that advice in both companies, we're always trying to target like the quality sensitive people.

Lav Crnobrnja [00:57:36]:
And I would say that that's probably one of the most important, important pieces of advice I got very early on, even before we started the businesses.

Omer Khan [00:57:41]:
I Love that strategy. 101. That's cool stuff. What book would you recommend to our audience and why?

Lav Crnobrnja [00:57:47]:
So I would recommend 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. It really helped me. I know it's an old book, but it really helped me figure out how to get myself better organized, like my own life and like how to, you know, like, look at things a certain way or I would say the right way. So I would say that's probably out of the business books. One of the best ones. I should probably reread it because I read it a while ago and I needed a little refresher and I like to do that with some books.

Lav Crnobrnja [00:58:12]:
And I just want to add a couple of biographies that I thought were fantastic because I think those are really inspiring. So Shoe Dog, which is the book about Phil Knight and Nike. Wow. Probably one of the best business biographies. It's so amusing and interesting and inspiring. Highly recommend that one. And then also Elon Musk and Becoming Steve Jobs. I think those are very inspiring books. You know, when I read them, I was like, let's get to work. You know, like, come on, you know. So I feel that these are some great books.

Lav Crnobrnja [00:58:37]:
If you want some inspiration, read about some of their challenges because, wow, these guys had to go through some crazy stuff to get to where they are.

Omer Khan [00:58:44]:
That's awesome. What's one attribute or characteristic in your mind of a successful founder?

Lav Crnobrnja [00:58:52]:
Persistence. That's the most important, hands down, most important. Keep going. That's the thing. Keep going in the face of adversity. Keep going. Persistence is what marks the difference between success and failure.

Omer Khan [00:59:05]:
What's your favorite personal productivity tool or habit?

Lav Crnobrnja [00:59:09]:
My wife makes fun of me for this all the time. I like to have systems for everything. Like this shirt, for example, is my uniform. I wear it every day. It's a system. I have a system for my clothing. I have a system for how I eat. I have a system for things to eliminate thinking so I can save my mental bandwidth for the really important decisions and also my decision power because I think there's a limited amount of decision power.

Lav Crnobrnja [00:59:28]:
And, and so if you're thinking about what am I going to eat for breakfast and what am I going to wear today, you're wasting that decision making power on these trivial things. So I try to sort all that stuff through a system so I don't have to think about these things and then I can get to work and do the important stuff and like really focus my mental bandwidth on the most important things.

Omer Khan [00:59:45]:
How did you learn about that? How do you. Is there a book or something that you use that helped you figure that stuff out?

Lav Crnobrnja [00:59:50]:
And so Steve Jobs used to wear that turtleneck every day. And I remember somebody writing about that and Mark Zuckerberg also had this turtle. And I remember somebody writing an article about that, I don't remember who, and reading it about this, this exactly about this decision making and like how limited it is and how you should, like how the reason they do this is because, because they're trying to conserve the energy for the important stuff. And I thought that made a lot of sense, you know, so I decided to adopt it.

Omer Khan [01:00:13]:
What's a new or crazy business idea you'd love to pursue if you had the time? And I think you might already be working on something. Right?

Lav Crnobrnja [01:00:20]:
We are. So when all this AI stuff started coming out, my partner and I got really excited about it because in the 90s I was in the, you know, I was into computers and like it, you know, I was using computers back in the DOS days, coding and basic and stuff. And so it really feels that AI is kind of like at that stage of computers right now. So I feel that there's a big wave coming and we need to be like, on it. Right.

Lav Crnobrnja [01:00:45]:
And so, like, the problem we, you know, we kind of really feel like solving is is advice to founders, like, kind of what you're doing, but do that to using AI. So one of the great things that you know are actually, we're very lucky that we have this is we have a lot of mentors who've been helping us over the years. A lot of successful people for some reason decided to, you know, take a bet on us and just invest time talking to us and giving us a lot of incredible advice.

Lav Crnobrnja [01:01:12]:
And without these people, we wouldn't be where we are today. But we recognize that this is a luxury that we have that probably a lot of founders don't have. So what we want to build is co founder GPT, or that's where at least the working title for it. So it's like we want to build a AI system that's going to allow other people who don't have the luxury that we have of having these mentors advise them on the business.

Lav Crnobrnja [01:01:34]:
We want to build an AI system that can do that for them and also help them do some marketing, you know, code a website and do some. Some things like this. This is kind of the big idea that we're exploring right now. We're in the meantime exploring a couple of smaller ideas, but that's kind of the big one that we'd like to tackle in the next couple of years.

Omer Khan [01:01:49]:
Cool. What's an interesting or fun fact about you that most people don't know?

Lav Crnobrnja [01:01:53]:
I've been DJing for the last 30 years.

Omer Khan [01:01:57]:
Love it. And finally, what's one of your most important passions outside of your work?

Lav Crnobrnja [01:02:01]:
So I guess the last question should kind of tip it off. I love music. I spend a lot of time listening to music with my son, all kinds of music. I'm just, I'm discovering as I'm educating my son about music, how diverse my musical tastes are and how much I love it. And really, I would say that's probably my other passion outside of like entrepreneurship is like just, I just love music.

Omer Khan [01:02:21]:
What kind of gear do you use for DJing these days? Because, I mean, you and I probably from kind of, you're probably similar age and, you know, I remember the days of the Technics turntables.

Lav Crnobrnja [01:02:35]:
And yeah, that's what I started with. So I had a Technics turntables in a new market, not even the 1200s. I couldn't afford to get the 1200s when I was starting, so I got this like 8 hundreds or something. It was Technics, but, like. And then I got the 1200s with a Newmark mixer. And then eventually I got like, the CDJs. And then eventually I transitioned to Traktor, which is what I'm using to this day. And now I just DJ for fun, for myself, as a kind of creative outlet. But I use Traktor.

Lav Crnobrnja [01:03:00]:
Right now I have an Allen and Heath mixer because my favorite DJs, they use Allen and Heath. And it's just the sound quality on this mixer is just like on another level. And so. And it's a mixer I bought 10 years ago. I'm still using it to this day. It's an incredible mixer. And then I use. I have the tractor controllers. I have like the. I don't remember. I think it's the X10 or something. I don't.

Lav Crnobrnja [01:03:19]:
So it's like the little controller which allows you to control two decks, and then I have the other one which allows you to control stems. That's the one I have at my cottage, and that's my main setup. And then in Montreal here, where at my house, I have the tractor, kind of the whole console, you know, where you have the. I forget what the model number is, but it's basically you have the decks and you have the fader, and everything is like built into one unit.

Lav Crnobrnja [01:03:40]:
So that I have here for when I want to play here in Montreal when I need a moment to just get out of everything and just get into the music and forget about everything, you know?

Omer Khan [01:03:47]:
Awesome. That's so cool. All right, well, love, thank you so much for joining me. It's been a pleasure talking about Vacation Tracker, the story and just the journey that you guys have been on and the sort of the lessons you've learned along the way. If people want to learn more about Vacation Tracker, they can go to vacationtracker IO and if folks want to get in touch with you, what's the best way for them to do that?

Lav Crnobrnja [01:04:10]:
Just shoot me an email. I'm actually very accessible and I talk to everybody. So you can send me an email to lavacationtracker IO And I love helping other entrepreneurs because I got so much help over the years. I feel that I need to give back right now. So if there's somebody out there that I can help out, I'm happy to do so.

Omer Khan [01:04:26]:
Awesome. Thanks, man. It's been a pleasure and I wish you and the team the best of success.

Lav Crnobrnja [01:04:31]:
Thank you so much for having me.

Omer Khan [01:04:32]:
Omer my pleasure. Cheers.