Omer Khan [00:00:09]:
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 Jonathan Rhyne, the co founder and CEO of PSPDFkit, a software development kit that enables developers to integrate advanced PDF functionalities into their apps.
Omer Khan [00:00:36]:
In 2014, Jonathan was working as an attorney, living with his in laws and about to start a family when he took a huge risk to join PSPDFKit as a co founder. The startup was just making 20k in monthly recurring revenue at the time. Jonathan and his co founder faced the challenge of growing their business in a market where even Adobe hadn't yet solved these problems. They immediately got to work. Jonathan overhauled their pricing, introduced a new subscription model, and focused on creating valuable content to attract developers. And eventually the hard work paid off.
Omer Khan [00:01:09]:
In just 8 months, they grew from 20k MRR to 1 million in annual recurring revenue, a huge win for any startup. But their rapid growth also brought unexpected challenges. They struggled to balance customer demands with their long term vision, often resorting to quick fixes that risked creating technical debt and future problems. Despite their initial success, the next few years were challenging. Their attempts to launch new products didn't work out, leaving them unsure of their direction. Growth slowed down, market uncertainties and tight finances tested their resolve.
Omer Khan [00:01:43]:
But the founders persevered, steadily growing the business year after year. Today, after overcoming numerous obstacles, their business generates multiple eight figures in ARR with a team of 150 people across 27 countries. In this episode, you'll learn how Jonathan made the leap from lawyer to startup founder and why he took such a big risk.
Omer Khan [00:02:03]:
What strategies Jonathan used to grow from 20k MRR to 1 million in ARR in just 8 months, how the founders balanced short term customer demands with long term product vision and the costly mistakes they made along the way why the transition from bootstrapped to investor backed was eventually necessary but challenging and how it fundamentally changed the business and how pespdfkit adapted their marketing and sales strategies over time to finally achieve sustainable growth in a competitive market. So I hope you enjoy it. Jonathan, welcome to the show.
Jonathan Rhyne [00:02:37]:
Hey, thanks for having me.
Omer Khan [00:02:38]:
Omar, do you have a favorite quote? Something that inspires or motivates you that you can share with us?
Jonathan Rhyne [00:02:43]:
Yeah, like you know I was in high school in my kind of late 90s, early 2000s, so the whole Think different campaign with Apple is a huge one. So I am you know, self proclaimed Steve Jobs fan, I'm an Apple fanboy if you want to call it. So you know that, that, that campaign, if you, that if you remember back to it, the end line it is, you know, the people are crazy enough to think that they can change the one. The world are actually the ones that do.
Jonathan Rhyne [00:03:13]:
And to me that's a super like a good reminder to be ambitious. You know, don't look for other people to do something. If you want something to change, the best way to do it, best way to predict the future, best way to make the future is be the one going out there and trying to do it. And so I kind of try to live by that. I kind of try to, you know, you want to be ambitious and not unrealistic or arrogant, but at the same time you don't want to be under ambitious.
Omer Khan [00:03:39]:
Yeah, totally. So tell us about PSPDF kit. What does the product do, who is it for and what's the main problem you're helping them solve?
Jonathan Rhyne [00:03:49]:
Yeah, so I have to tell you, kind of early days, we were an iOS framework originally it was just done because the iPhone had came out, iOS SDK came out and nobody could put a PDF viewer on it. So most people think like, well, doesn't Adobe know this? And no, they didn't. And so there was this need for companies that were putting a magazine app for a reader on the first iPad or things like this. And, and we kind of saw the niche.
Jonathan Rhyne [00:04:16]:
We built it, we built literally a magazine viewer with it and then kind of put it up on a store. And lo and behold, we found a need as the mobile kind of industry took off. Now if you fast forward to kind of today, we went from just being this like mobile SDK developer tool provider to much broader facet. We've bought a few companies.
Jonathan Rhyne [00:04:39]:
So we have everything from developer tools for the web, every major java framework or JavaScript framework out there, to mobile iOS, Android hybrid frameworks, all the way to literally like server side libraries to do, I don't know, Net batch processing of invoices, signing, viewing. If you go to our website and look at our list, you'll know a lot of the customers on our list that most people are surprised were the unknown ingredient. A lot of these apps because there isn't a huge massive open source community that solves these problems.
Jonathan Rhyne [00:05:15]:
They get you 80% of the way. There's. And then we kind of do the rest. And as we built that out, you know, we have a workflow automation tool as well as, you know, kind of integrations for IT administrators and things like Salesforce and SharePoint.
Omer Khan [00:05:30]:
You know, like hearing you talk, you sound like, you know, you could just be another tech founder from the Valley. And I think many people would be surprised to know that your background before you, you, you, you know, jumped in on this business. You were an attorney.
Jonathan Rhyne [00:05:46]:
Yeah, and it's a really interesting story if you think about how I got into this business because so I started out in computer science at NC State. I was a gamer. Still game to this day, whether it's like turn based strategy or first person shooters, you know, I still play Apex Legends, things like this. And so I loved computers because I love gaming, I love competition. There's. And the first thing you run into is like, okay, well I need to build a website for my client.
Jonathan Rhyne [00:06:13]:
I need to, you know, collect analytics and I need to have a database to display them. And so then I went to school and I quickly kind of realized like, hey man, I don't want to be sitting behind a computer all day long. But I had two years of a CS degree. I pivoted to political science. I then, you know, was very much adamant, like, okay, I need to go to grad school, I'm trying to raise a family. Things like this law, law really appealed to me. I went to law school. I love law school.
Jonathan Rhyne [00:06:41]:
And I came out in 2009. It was like the worst period of time ever to come out of law school. Kind of like today is like, you know, you're seeing people get laid off in the tech space that was the legal field in 2009 or 2008. 2009. And so the iPhone SDK had just come out. My brother was at a government contracting agency and he was a huge Apple fanboy. Way before it was cool to be an Apple fanboy. Like he was a Mac developer. Like we're talking about a Dyn or here.
Jonathan Rhyne [00:07:09]:
And so he was starting a mobile agency and going to these conferences and I kind of was like, hey, you know, who's at these conferences? And I was just trying. I was literally working at Sears, selling appliances, doing the exact same job I had in high school, living at my mother's house. I had two degrees and a license to practice law. So you can imagine the mind space I was in. And still I was like, you know, I just, I gotta find, you know, gotta find a way to break through.
Jonathan Rhyne [00:07:34]:
I gotta make this a positive. So I started going to these conferences he went to because the attorneys that were showing up were all patent trolls. They're patent attorneys trying to get people to file patents for software. And a lot of these indie developers were essentially, you know, I'm starting a business. I've never been a business owner. Now I got a contract in front of me or I need to register a trademark or I need to incorporate my business. And I just kind of was like, well, hey, I know about software.
Jonathan Rhyne [00:08:02]:
I can negotiate the contract. So I started getting talks about it. I kind of became known as the iPhone attorney guy. And I just started, you know, building a practice in that space. And yeah, lo and behold, as my legal career went off and I started the litigation practice, I got to a point where I met Peter and I had an opportunity. Peter's my co founder, Peter Steinberger. I had an opportunity where he was in a place where he became a client of mine, the company became a client of mine. And they basically were.
Jonathan Rhyne [00:08:33]:
He was like, hey, man, I don't want to deal with all this stuff. Can you just do it? And it was kind of like, well, I can. I can show you the doors. I can't open them for you. I'm your attorney. I'm not like, I can't make decisions for you. And so the early days that happened in 2008, 2009, the early kind of sales career I had, the early kind of gaming career I had all kind of came together beautifully for this opportunity when we started this business.
Omer Khan [00:08:59]:
So I want to talk about how you kind of joined because you didn't join at zero. You joined at 0.02. We'll talk about that. But before we get into that, give us a sense of the size of the business. Where are you today in terms of revenue, number of customers, size of team, so on.
Jonathan Rhyne [00:09:18]:
Yeah, I won't give exact numbers on revenue, but, I mean, I would say we're about a series D when I say that, I mean we're in the multiple eight figures of revenue. You know, we're still growing fairly rapidly. We've done some organic and, you know, inorganic growth. We bought a couple of companies. We're around 150 people. We're in about 27 different countries. Out of those, we're fully remote. So we're kind of.
Jonathan Rhyne [00:09:46]:
We have this bit where we were headquartered in Europe, in Vienna, Austria, and kind of headquartered out of Raleigh, North Carolina, because that's where Peter sat and that's where I sat. And our other business partner, Martin Schurler, was over there as well.
Omer Khan [00:09:57]:
You guys have raised, I think, about 100 million euros to date, which is through private equity. But the really interesting thing about your business is, and I had no idea until you told me just a few minutes ago was that you were bootstrapped until you guys were about 12 million in ARR.
Jonathan Rhyne [00:10:22]:
Yeah, that's correct. I feel lucky. And so one of the things, I think it's very rare that you go down this path. I think it's very rare that you're in a market that you can survive going down this path. I mean, but we grew a sustainable business. We were profitable, I mean, very early. Other than paying ourselves, we paid ourselves through the profits. But I mean we didn't take on debt. Debt in Europe, debt, especially in Germany and Germanic countries.
Jonathan Rhyne [00:10:53]:
It's kind of like a four letter word I like to say, you know, like they just don't do it. So we had to grow by getting the next customer and then thinking smartly about how are we going to invest this money back in the company, how are we going to grow, you know, and how do we get in a place where we don't have to pay? Man, we can't afford to pay you anymore. You're really great. You're really awesome. I just don't have the capital to do it.
Jonathan Rhyne [00:11:19]:
And we're lucky that we were able to do that. And yeah, the market changed in Covid, so we got interest along the way. We had probably, we talked to about four to five companies, some of them very large strategics that people know that wanted to buy us in the early days. But we kind of just wanted to continue doing what we're doing. And then we reached, you know, you reached that seven, eight year mark. And I think, you know, some people, you know, they've, they've run out of, out of steam. They're ready for a break.
Jonathan Rhyne [00:11:52]:
You have burnout, you know, and you're looking for a change. And Covid was super, super. We already had a growing business and then Covid was an accelerator of like remote hybrid work, which is essentially what we were helping companies do. And so it was a good time. Multiples were great in 21 as well. And so it kind of made sense to look for a raise. My two business partners wanted to exit, you know, see how we could do that. And it kind of played out.
Jonathan Rhyne [00:12:21]:
And that was, you know, two and a half years ago and we've had some rapid growth.
Omer Khan [00:12:27]:
So you talked about, you know, Peter being a client of yours, but at what point did you actually, you know, jump on board and actually become and be considered a, another, you know, co founder in this business?
Jonathan Rhyne [00:12:41]:
Yeah, so when I met Peter, it was Just him running the business. He would pull in a part time contractor if he needed like a design work or something like this. I think with the classic, you know, you try to, if you have money and you can get things, get people that are better than you that doing the things you're not good at, you try to do it, you know, cheap and if you can't, you do it yourself. And that was kind of where Peter was at.
Jonathan Rhyne [00:13:06]:
But Peter was very much a, you know, an engineer, was the technical founder. He was, he enjoyed being in the code, he enjoyed, that's what he wanted to do all day. And he met me and I was kind of the business sales, everything else person. I was at a law firm, I was on a partnership track. I was living with my in laws, we were buying our first house and my wife was pregnant with our first child.
Omer Khan [00:13:29]:
The perfect time to join a startup.
Jonathan Rhyne [00:13:32]:
It was a little crazy, but yeah. So we met, they became a client of mine and that kind of gave me a good insight as to like what, what is going on here? What, what, what actually is here? Where do I think I could actually make an impact? Do I think I can scale this?
Jonathan Rhyne [00:13:51]:
Not just from, you know, we just, just had a web store up and there wasn't a lot of segmentation and, and it was a lot of stuff for me that I kind of looked and said I, I, I can, I can add a lot to this if I get involved here. And he kind of got to a point where he was like, hey, I'm, I'm sick of dealing with the business side of it.
Jonathan Rhyne [00:14:10]:
I'm also ready to have a partner to kind of go on this journey with me and let's start, let's start actually, you know, investing this money and I think we're large enough. And so yeah, you know, it worked out. He was applying to mine for three months and then I decided, hey, let me come on at night for three months now. Work. I'll work at the law firm during the day, I'll work at night helping out. Let's, you know, you're 4, 500 miles away from me.
Jonathan Rhyne [00:14:36]:
Let's get to know each other, let's see what we can do together and if it works out, we'll do it. And about three weeks into that, that three months, I was clear. We got along very well. We complimented each other, we trusted each other and we saw, we literally saw some really great returns in that first year of me joining. Just in doing some structural changes to the business model.
Omer Khan [00:15:01]:
You basically leapt off the cliff Right. You're, you're in a really great job. You've got all of these things going on in your personal life. Sure, you can see this business and you, you connect with a co founder who, who you guys get. You know, the two of you get on with each other, but the business is not doing a lot of money. It's like 20k mrr and it's bootstrap. It's not like, yeah, we've just raised this ton of money and don't worry about it, you're good for.
Omer Khan [00:15:34]:
We got a two, three year Runway or whatever. So it was a pretty big risk, wasn't it?
Jonathan Rhyne [00:15:39]:
Yeah. And I mean, to be fair to Peter, it was a pretty big risk what he gave up for me to come on as well. Like, he owned 100% of the business, so he had to incentivize me as well and kind of if this goes well, and I think if I hadn't joined at that time, I don't think the incentive I got and the outcome I got would have been there as well. So, yeah, like, but the other side of it was you had to look at what I was doing personally.
Jonathan Rhyne [00:16:06]:
My brother was, you know, could be anywhere. He had an Internet connection in an airport because he was remote and he was going to New York and consulting. I mean, he did mobile apps for Obamacare for America, did mobile apps for Whole Foods. It's like really big stuff. And here I was, I had a license to practice in Virginia and I had a license to practice in North Carolina. And that seemed really small towning to me.
Jonathan Rhyne [00:16:30]:
It wasn't ambitious enough, my family likes to say, My brother likes to say you're kind of like a cat with nine lives. Like, if you get thrown off the porch, you somehow land on your feet. And so I do have a high risk tolerance, but I also really saw like an opportunity in the business. I saw a vision in it. I mean, listen, I still see the vision in it, to be frank. And so why not back yourself?
Jonathan Rhyne [00:17:01]:
And to me, you know, if you're gonna start a, if you're gonna start a startup, you gotta have a little bit of that. Because if you don't go get a job somewhere now, there's ways to like mitigate that. Like I tell people all the time, you know, it's the same way Peter started. When he did it, he was waiting for his visa to go work in Silicon Valley and he did a consulting job that he retained the IP to, the framework that he built.
Jonathan Rhyne [00:17:29]:
And so, like, if you can do this Kind of part time thing. It can kind of work, like work your nights and weekends to build your side project and try to do it. That's a great way to do it. But at some point you got a decision like you gotta go for broke and. Yeah. And you, you might fail and you gotta get back up and go for broke again. And I would say the earlier you do it, the better.
Jonathan Rhyne [00:17:49]:
I mean if I have three kids now, there's no way I would've been able to do it with three kids. Like, there's no way I'd have been able to take that risk.
Omer Khan [00:17:56]:
So I think it was 20, around 2014 that you joined, is that right?
Jonathan Rhyne [00:18:00]:
That's correct.
Omer Khan [00:18:01]:
So 20K MRR. And then roughly how long did it take to get to the first million in ARR?
Jonathan Rhyne [00:18:09]:
This is a good and bad story. It probably took us from 250k, around 8 months to get to a million.
Omer Khan [00:18:18]:
All right, let's unpack that. You obviously did something or at least that change happened or the trajectory change. When you joined the business and teamed up with Peter, what did you do? Let's talk about this first, first couple of months, what did you start doing to drive growth and how did you figure out where to, where to focus?
Jonathan Rhyne [00:18:47]:
The first thing I did was we had a web store, we had a product led growth strategy where people came to it and then we literally had this one. What the common contact us is now. And it was if your company is behind a paywall or you know, you have a login, you know, contact us and you need a different license and we weren't on a subscription. You got to remember 2014 there was no such thing. Like Adobe had just gone to subscriptions.
Jonathan Rhyne [00:19:18]:
And so I kind of looked and said, hey, we're going to go to subscriptions. And their customers that, you know, canceled were done B. I looked and said we're going to take down this one, stop pricing because. And this worked for our business because you got to understand we had large companies like Dropbox that was contacting us to do this for file previewing. And then we had, I don't know, the college student trying to get their mobile app or the indie developer trying to get their mobile app. I couldn't charge that same price to both.
Jonathan Rhyne [00:19:53]:
I'm providing a different value to each. So I early on became the first salesperson and you charge different prices. So instead of charging, I don't know, five, you know, whatever, even if it's like a per user thing, 15 per user, you know, go bespoke And I think a lot of these small SaaS startups, because they're technically, you know, they're technical founded, a lot of technical founders are allergic to that. They don't like. And I want, I want transparent pricing up front.
Jonathan Rhyne [00:20:24]:
And, you know, you're facetious or, you know, you're doing something dirty if you don't have that.
Omer Khan [00:20:29]:
Yeah. So just to clarify, Jonathan, your target customer at the time in that first year, Was that primarily iOS developers?
Jonathan Rhyne [00:20:38]:
Yes. And this was a space where both me and Peter kind of came from.
Omer Khan [00:20:43]:
Right. And so what was the model that developers were used to in terms of licensing these types of, you know, kits.
Jonathan Rhyne [00:20:54]:
So with each app store, there's something called a bundle id, it's a reverse URL. I like to call it like an address. So whatever your address is for your app. So at the time, like if you had one app on the main public store and then you had an app in enterprise store, those were two separate apps. Right. And unlike, you know, Android, there was no sidecarding, so it wasn't like you were able to load an instance of another app in another app.
Jonathan Rhyne [00:21:21]:
So we quickly went to per app, like it was a per app basis. But we were also pretty flexible on the business model. This was another thing I changed. So some early customers that were just starting up, we would take a revenue share and essentially we wouldn't get paid that much. But then over periods of time, it scaled like crazy and those became great deals for us. So we kind of charade not just like one metric, but like, I don't know, any metric you can think of that work to close the deal. We're kind of.
Jonathan Rhyne [00:21:54]:
We've been dealing with the cleanup of that basically since. But in the early days, you know that. That is very true. You kind of do the best deal that gets the customer up and running. That is kind of the win win for your business and we win one for your customer. And so that was kind of what we did.
Jonathan Rhyne [00:22:11]:
And yeah, in the iOS space, the good thing about it in those early mobile days is you had indie developers, it was growing very rapidly growing, and you had some really large corporations that were just trying to figure out how to have a mobile presence. And so the horizontalness of the framework and we're like digital paper, if you think about it, is huge. And so we were in a lot of different industries pretty early on and a lot of different use cases. And some of those were large deals and some of those were tiny deals.
Omer Khan [00:22:48]:
Okay, great. So there's a broad demand. You switch to a subscription model for licensing your kit per year, actually, and
Jonathan Rhyne [00:23:00]:
paid up front per year, not even monthly.
Omer Khan [00:23:03]:
So that's one thing you're, you're, you're effectively, hopefully, you know, increasing revenue there. But what were you doing to acquire more customers?
Jonathan Rhyne [00:23:13]:
Yeah, and this is, I like to talk about, like, one of the things that I think early days, when you're the first two or three people at a company, you have multiple jobs, you got to do everything. There is no one. I mean, every founder knows this. They feel it. They, like now some people choose not to do some stuff. One of the things that we had really well and our, you know, my three co founders or that two other co founders myself, is like, we would talk about what we were doing.
Jonathan Rhyne [00:23:45]:
We would like literally every single day right on Twitter. That was how we recruited. So it was like we needed people to know about us. If we wanted to get talent, we needed people to know about us so that they knew what our product was. We talked at conferences because we were already connected to the conference scene. So we would talk about what we were doing before we give a conference talk. And then the thing I think that was really interesting was that the type of content that we were producing.
Jonathan Rhyne [00:24:13]:
There's kind of two things I believe in, but one is like, people want helpful content. Help them out with something. So I just told you, a piece of content that sends, I don't know, 13,000 people a month to our website. What is a bundle ID? It has nothing to do with PDFs or documents or anything like this. It literally just if you're in the iOS space, people Google, I don't know what a bundle ID, and they find a blog post who wrote about it. We wrote about like 2015 or something like that.
Jonathan Rhyne [00:24:42]:
So we just started producing content, all of us, Peter, I mean, literally, Peter wrote almost like a blog about a problem he ran into, you know, swizzling, doing like, you know, things that were really pertinent, that were catnip for an iOS developer. And so what was crazy is like, you know, three years later, we went to Dub Dub, Apple's developers conference. And you would be in a line waiting to go into the, you know, the keynote. And I bet every other developer there knew who we were.
Jonathan Rhyne [00:25:16]:
They knew who our company was by the buyer T shirt. And listen, our company's name is PSPDFkit. Like, it's not this beautifully named company. But so people knew it because they had read our blog and they had found something interesting or they had followed Peter on Twitter or they had saw a conference I was at. And so I think that just giving back to the community, giving back to where your ICP is and especially in developer marketing and genuinely doing that, like not fake doing it, really, really buys you a lot of credibility.
Jonathan Rhyne [00:25:52]:
It buys you a lot of awareness, it buys you a lot of referrals. It also helps you with SEO because if people are reading it and searching for things, well, now when you put out something pertinent to your space, well, all of a sudden your domain authority at Google's, you know, huge because you have all these people visiting your, your website and spending in three minutes to five minutes visit on your website reading an article. So kind of work both ways.
Omer Khan [00:26:17]:
Yeah, yeah, totally. So, so going, going from the 20 like 250k in ARR to basically 4xing that to getting to the first million, you said 8 months. And then so what I heard was you changed basically the business model and how you were pricing the product to. You started, all of you were writing content and publishing and trying to get index and generate more organic search traffic.
Omer Khan [00:26:50]:
And then thirdly, you guys were building basically in public, you're using Twitter and, and just trying to raise visibility of what you guys were doing as founders and how you were going about building this, this business. Were those are three main things that drove the growth and helped you get to the.
Jonathan Rhyne [00:27:08]:
Yeah, and the, the fourth one I would put in there. And you're going to get some bias from me because I'm from the business side of the business. Right. Don't get me wrong, I was heavily involved in the product direction, but I think the other thing we did was when we built something new that we knew was a value to a customer, a current customer of ours, did we just include it or did we charge them for it?
Jonathan Rhyne [00:27:35]:
So you have to create this segmentation and it can't be, you know, I don't know, tiny little improvement. I'm going to charge you for it or your customer will, will hate you. But if you do something major to the business, like, I don't know, everybody's adding AI functionality right now. You're adding functionality to your product. Challenge your customers for that extra, like segment it out, premium price it. So that also led to this, like, you know, what now people call customer success and this whole sort of like internal growth.
Jonathan Rhyne [00:28:05]:
Your customers, like we created and our customers were happy to pay us more money because we were this small startup. They relied on us and we were providing more value to them and they just wanted us to see us Survive because they were banking and building some functionality in their apps that they needed to exist for five or ten years down the road. So kind of those, those things all kind of collectively led. And then of course, like, you know, this is the fifth thing.
Jonathan Rhyne [00:28:33]:
This is definitely later on, you know, this is when you start thinking about, okay, well so we have this iOS product coming, what's next? And you need to have money, you need to have the business model down to be able to invest in the next thing that's going to grow the business. And so I like to tell people, a lot of people don't think, they don't think about innovation and business model. It's like the last place people, everything's innovation and technology.
Jonathan Rhyne [00:28:58]:
And if you look at some of the largest businesses in the world, the ipod, what was the big thing with the iPod? $0.99 solves innovation and the business model. I think that's true strategy. And what I've seen, even when I was an attorney or even now, I've seen a ton of phenomenal products solving really difficult problems that plateaued or didn't get to revenue growth because they just didn't have the business model right or they weren't marketing themselves, they weren't telling their story.
Jonathan Rhyne [00:29:28]:
I see those way more than I see shin products, if that makes any sense.
Omer Khan [00:29:32]:
Did you do any outbound, any cold email in the early days to try and acquire customers?
Jonathan Rhyne [00:29:37]:
I would say we did it, we probably did it around 800 to 1 million. We started, hey, why don't we try to do this? And we saw you try to think, let's try to do this. I think for the SDK business, the complexity of our cell, I mean, I tell people all the time, it's kind of like a four part cell. Like first you gotta convince the person they need to build off a PDF, right? Because there's other ways to build.
Jonathan Rhyne [00:30:06]:
Then you gotta convince some, like, you know, open source out there isn't gonna solve your problem. You're gonna run into issues. Well, they're gonna want to figure that out. Then you're gonna convince them, hey, there's other competitors in this market, but we're the best one for your needs. And then the fourth one is, oh, hey, by the way, we're not charging small prices. It's a premium price product. That's a really difficult sell to do outbound. Especially when you're not, I mean, we're not looking at two year, we're trying to survive.
Jonathan Rhyne [00:30:37]:
We weren't trying to like look at two year, you Know, sales cycles, which oftentimes outbound sales cycles. Unless you have a product that you can immediately identify the need and you can come in, sell it quickly, it's not a complex thing. There isn't a lot of competition for it. That's where outbound works very well and it just didn't work for us. We never saw the ROI for it, to be frank.
Omer Khan [00:31:01]:
Yeah, I mean that makes a lot of sense. But I would say equally with content marketing SEO, you have some challenges there as well. I mean, yes, you can reach people who are, you know, talking about the funnel problem aware, they're solution aware. So they're more closer to being convinced to that buying decision. But you also have this problem that if you're publishing content, it may not drive any organic search traffic for six months, 12 months. Right. So how did that work out for you guys?
Jonathan Rhyne [00:31:41]:
I mean the big thing that I think we, we, it was harder for us and when we released our Android framework a little bit later because we weren't knee deep in the Android market. And then when we released, we released our Web framework in 2017 and it was like what we did on the web framework each one of these times, it's like recreating a company almost. We were first on webassembly pretty early. Webassembly is basically like a technology to be able to run back end processes in the browser client side.
Jonathan Rhyne [00:32:13]:
And a lot of people weren't really sure whether it was actually ready for production when we started using it. And we knew early on we kind of made a bet we're going to be there. Also we created a website called Is webassembly fast yet? And it was a benchmark where you could literally run your things through webassembly and it would show you what it'd do on different browsers. We got on hacker News where our audience is, we told them about this, we promoted it and then all of a sudden people started going to it.
Jonathan Rhyne [00:32:45]:
And then lo and behold, one of the major, you know, browsers, I think it might have been Chrome, reached out to us and said, hey, we want to use your browser to benchmark Chrome. Holy shit. Well then all of a sudden Safari reached out to us, hey, we want to bench, we want to use your browser, benchmark Safari off of it. That alone like those type of.
Jonathan Rhyne [00:33:04]:
And the example I'm trying to give is if you can think of something that is important to your customer base, where they're at, where are they hanging out, where are they at? I don't like, you know, in today's world, maybe it's Reddit or maybe it's stack overflow, maybe it's some forum. You gotta find where they're at, where the, you gotta define who your ICP is. You gotta find out where they're at, become part of that community.
Jonathan Rhyne [00:33:31]:
You know that, that's the, the thing that I think is really hard is when you have founders or people that are trying to solve a problem and they're not involved in that community at all. They don't know the community. They're just trying to sell to that community. You're gonna, yeah, you're gonna be, you know, putting out content and it's not gonna, not gonna mean anything. So I think the more you know that icp, the more you understand what they value. The, the day to day problem they're going in.
Jonathan Rhyne [00:33:57]:
This is why so many problems, so many businesses that are started on problems that people have that they solve for themselves work out so well, because you are that icmp. So the more you know that icp, then find out where they're at, then try to write compelling content. You know, one of the things is like, people always have writer's block and say, I don't know what to write about. I think what people don't realize is, look at the way people consume content online. Half of the things they want to know is who is Jonathan Rhyne?
Jonathan Rhyne [00:34:27]:
What does Jonathan Rhyne do all day? What does a day in Jonathan Rhyne's life look like? You know, everybody cares when they're interested in a company or interested in this. They care about what is, what do you, what do you like, who are you like, what's it around it, what are you doing? Just write, just write about your day. And yeah, it's a habit, it's a muscle. And you know, examples I like to give is like, you know Bruce Springsteen, everybody knows Bruce Springsteen. This like, you know, artist or whatever.
Jonathan Rhyne [00:34:55]:
What they don't realize is how much, how many songs he produced. You know, Picasso, I think it was like the, the whole joke of Picasso throwing away the napkin and the lady going, oh, don't throw that away, give it to me. And you said, okay, that's you, 20 grand. How can an actor be worth 20 grand? He goes, well, you know, you just did it in, you know, five minutes. He goes, I didn't do that in five minutes. I did in five, you know, 50 years or whatever.
Jonathan Rhyne [00:35:18]:
That's the thing, you don't know what's going to catch. So you got to just kind of do these, do these, do These don't. Don't make them huge bets. Do as many little, small, little bets, many little, small, little tests. Brute force the problem. Brute, you know, brute ack it, and you'll start to see stuff that works. But I think the first thing going back to your saying is like, you got to know your ICP very well, know what they value, know where they're at, engage them.
Jonathan Rhyne [00:35:43]:
I don't want to say it's that simple, but it is that simple.
Omer Khan [00:35:46]:
So that example you gave about, you know, how you spend your day, where were you publishing this?
Jonathan Rhyne [00:35:52]:
Was you.
Omer Khan [00:35:52]:
Would you publish this as a blog post? Would you share it on Twitter, or you tweet about it?
Jonathan Rhyne [00:35:56]:
Like, what was the combination of both? You know, talk about it on Twitter, we publish it. You know, one of the first thing I did was Peter was writing a lot on his own personal PeterSteinberger.com type website, like everybody does. Most people separate their personal brand from their, you know, their startup brand because they. They want to write about these things that matter to them here, and they don't want it diluted over here. And I told him, no, stop it. Like, you can be the personal brand. We are the personal brand.
Jonathan Rhyne [00:36:26]:
Talk about it on psp. That's who we are. Maybe it's not about the product we're doing. Maybe everyone doesn't want to read it, but there will be people that will go, I don't know, like, cool. He has a really good, you know, office desk, and what, what monitors does he like or what tools does he use?
Jonathan Rhyne [00:36:43]:
And they care about that stuff, even though they may not be buying the product that you're doing, but when somebody comes to them and says, hey, you know, I have this document, brown, blah, blah, blah, they'll go, hey, man, I know this really cool guy. You have a really cool office set up. And by the way, I. I think he might sell a PDF SDK. Just check it out. And that, that is the magic. That's the magic of what you need to get started. That's a little tiny spark you need.
Omer Khan [00:37:07]:
So, so in many ways, yeah, you were creating content for your. Your target customer, your icp, but you were also just sharing just life, like, what you were up to, what you cared about, what you were interested in with the world. And in many ways, it just, even if they weren't your target customers, they were people who were able to build some kind of connection with you and remembered you had some PDF thing.
Jonathan Rhyne [00:37:38]:
I mean, the thing is, I don't know what, I don't know which article or which tweet or which conversation I had on a coffee break at a conference led to them telling someone else about it. So I just do all of them, and it became a habit. And LinkedIn now is this. I mean, like, come on, anybody that's on LinkedIn, this is all LinkedIn now, like that. And it's very noisy. Twitter's disastrous now. But, like, Twitter wasn't like this before you could find.
Jonathan Rhyne [00:38:10]:
I mean, the reason we were on Twitter is because the iOS dev community was on Twitter then. And so, like, that was where my. That's where our audience group was. Right. And so, yeah, I think that, you know, these people were all throughout the US And Europe, and that was our water cooler. So they also wanted to know who you were at the water cooler.
Omer Khan [00:38:32]:
Cool. So let's. We've talked a little bit about growth and just generally in terms of, like, getting to that first million and some of the things you were doing around content marketing and SEO and so on. Let's talk about a little bit about the product side. And in those early days, it was great. I mean, you were attracting these people.
Omer Khan [00:38:53]:
The business is starting to grow fairly quickly, but then you've also got this problem where you're getting all kinds of random requests for things that seem super important, that seem like features that are gonna move the needle with growing revenue even more and faster. And you guys were trying to respond to every. Every request that was coming in. But as you learned the hard way, it wasn't always the best way to invest your time.
Jonathan Rhyne [00:39:23]:
The treadmill. Until you get the product market fit or you can afford to say no to customers, this is one of the probably hardest things, because you get into it. Normally when people get into a business and they do it, they have a vision, they have a. You know, it's a baby. We want to do this. We start getting customers, and the customers start telling you what your baby needs to look like, what clothes you need to dress it in, and, you know, needs this or needs that, and. And they're.
Jonathan Rhyne [00:39:52]:
They're pushing what they need, right? Or they're pushing the extra thing. And software is, I think, all software. You know, the beauty of SaaS is, can I take something that everybody wants their own Ferrari and can I make it into a sedan for at least most of the people, or a van or whatever it is? And then people ultimately then want you to like, yeah, but I want the van that drives as fast as a Ferrari. And they start then trying to push you back into customization.
Jonathan Rhyne [00:40:21]:
And this is A rat race, especially when you need revenue. Because some of those customers I can't say no to and some of those customers, like, I don't know, they're threatening to churn if I don't do it. Don't go somewhere else yet. I have, you know, a small engineering group that didn't join just to erratically do the next fire. And I mean really, it became firefighting. Like what's the issue of today that the customer's gonna scream the loudest that we need to do right now and get it done.
Jonathan Rhyne [00:40:53]:
And I think it, it takes both guts. It takes if there's nuance that you need to kind of balance the two. You gotta get to a point where you can say, I'm gonna time about two, two weeks, where I tell the customer, sorry, it's not gonna happen until later. So you can work on the things that you think, your vision of the product and where it should go. The other thing is like the tech depth this does. I mean if you do it long enough, you'll, you'll freeze.
Jonathan Rhyne [00:41:21]:
Like you're literally not, you'll, you'll have something that's so fragile, you'll have to start from scratch again. And then it's the death nail to, to a SaaS business because if you start losing customers quickly, they don't come back, right? You get a reputation of I use that product, it's so fucking buggy, you know, so like you got to keep up quality, right? And so, but it was really hard.
Omer Khan [00:41:46]:
You said one thing to me that you said the impact was good short term for the business and bad long term for the business. Can you give maybe an example or two about what you mean by that?
Jonathan Rhyne [00:42:01]:
Let's say a customer comes, they need you to do some customization. It wasn't on your roadmap, but they're willing to pay your largest deal today. Cool. We're going to do it. Let's do it. Get it done. Two weeks, go at it. You sprint and you do it. You get that money feels great. Especially in the early days. I mean, one of the pieces of advice I'll tell people in the first million is remember how excited you got when you got what your largest deal was then.
Jonathan Rhyne [00:42:30]:
Because if you are successful, you miss how excited you got when those deals came in. And so the thing is you're excited about it at that moment, you know, but then you set the expectation with the customer that, you know, if they say jump, you'll say how high? And they don't care how much money you spent. And then when you say, well, but if you want me to jump that high again, I need you to pay me more money. And they're going, but I paid you so much money. No, no, jump again, jump again.
Jonathan Rhyne [00:43:01]:
And then you have the next deal that now is two times that largest deal. And they're saying, hey, jump, I got this thing I need you to do. But you're still jumping for the, the one that was half the size of it. And he'll nod and juggle the two. So what's really hard is that's a tough conversation that should happen at the beginning, should happen midway through. Like anything, sometimes setting expectations early is better than having to come back and set expectations later.
Jonathan Rhyne [00:43:30]:
The other thing is a lot of times, the way when you're a small, you know, you're smaller, you're, you're going out, you're thinking, man, this is so important to me. It must be so important to the customer. Have to do it. Maybe you don't have to do it. Maybe they don't need it. Maybe you just ask them like, when, when would you need this done? Well, actually, can you get this done in a year? Oh, shit. I thought you wanted in two weeks. Yeah, cool. Let's put that on the roadmap.
Jonathan Rhyne [00:43:53]:
But if you never ask that question, you're sprinting to do it two weeks. And then when you do it, they go, wow, you did that so fast. Let's see what else we can throw at you. And it's like, again, short term revenue gain, short term excitement because you close the deal. Long term, you're losing control of, of that roadmap, you're losing control of product and you're setting yourself up for bad bad, like, you know, could really piss off that customer. If you set an example so far and now all of a sudden it's different.
Jonathan Rhyne [00:44:24]:
And then that large guild turns because they view you as a consulting company, not as a SaaS business. That, that, that's the, especially with large, large customers in early days, you get a big customer coming, sometimes it's worse than if they didn't come.
Omer Khan [00:44:42]:
Yeah. So I think that's great advice. I think for many founders who are in that situation, in an ideal world, if you had product market fit and you, you were getting great traction, you could say no to a bunch of things that just feel off strategy in those early days, it's really hard. And the key, from what I heard from you, was being able to set expectations with customers so you're not always seen as the guys will Jump whenever they command it.
Omer Khan [00:45:13]:
And in order to get there, you need to get better at asking questions and not making assumptions. And what you said about, you know, when they need it is one example of that. Others I think could be what exactly is it that you think this is going to solve? And is there a different way that we could help you solve that now without going off and building a new feature?
Jonathan Rhyne [00:45:35]:
Yeah, exactly. And part of that, one of the reasons I do think this idea of you need to have a relationship with your customers early on. This is a hard thing with product led growth strategies. The great. But then immediately you need to start talking to those people because otherwise they start talking at you through support and you don't have a relationship with them.
Jonathan Rhyne [00:45:58]:
To have sort of a partnership discussion where they understand you're trying to build a product in a direct chain and you understand why they value your product and what they're using it for. That's super important.
Omer Khan [00:46:09]:
So the first million eight months, what was the next big milestone for you and how long did it take to get there?
Jonathan Rhyne [00:46:17]:
Yeah, 5 million probably was a big milestone. It probably took us three to four years. I'm trying to think it would have been 2015, we got to a million and it would have probably been entering 2018. So maybe three to four years that it took us to get to five and then, you know, from 2018-21 to get from five to 12. And yeah, you know, a couple of things changed. We, we tried a lot of new products. We, we started, if you, if you knew the graveyard.
Jonathan Rhyne [00:46:55]:
I mean we're not Google, but it's almost as bad or we didn't know what are we, we built a framework, so are we a frameworks company? Are we a PDF company? Are we just let's build a product and frame, we can put it out there and people give us money for it. We'll be any one of these things and have a bunch of little small businesses. We really had a strategy or a coherent strategy there.
Omer Khan [00:47:17]:
So what kind, what kind of products were you building alongside what you already had?
Jonathan Rhyne [00:47:21]:
We had a perfect example. One of the first products we released was called Watchtower. It never Control Tower, sorry. And it was literally a licensing tool because we built our own internal licensing tool to license our products. And so it kind of became like a lightweight CRM. We had a customer database in there. We invoiced our customers through it, we gave out licenses and we tracked those licenses in it. So we said, well, other, other companies that are building products need something like this. So let's put it out there. We put out a website.
Jonathan Rhyne [00:47:53]:
We had an ability for somebody to kind of like, you know, call us if they need it and crickets. And it was like, okay, yeah. And then the worst thing is you get one person that's interested and it's like, oh God, am I only going to sell this to one person? We tried a end user product that we called Doc Flow or Doc Flow that. It was kind of this idea.
Jonathan Rhyne [00:48:16]:
We had a customer in Europe that they were doing, you know, they were sending these people out to factories to do maintenance of these robotic doors. And we thought, okay, this is kind of like people in the field. And then you have a central base. So we created an app. We'll give the central base a viewpoint of everything, get all their documents in order and create a client side apps or a mobile device for the person in the field. And we worked with the customer, they loved it.
Jonathan Rhyne [00:48:43]:
We had two or three other people who got interested in different places, started to work on it and then it was like. But we didn't have a self service model for them to set up. So we had no, like, it literally was us starting a whole nother business while we were focusing on the, the thing that was actually making us money.
Omer Khan [00:48:59]:
So why, why did you guys do that? Why? You, you've got one business which grew fairly quickly to the, the first seven figures. And then it seems like you've got focus, clarity, where you need to take this, and then suddenly you've got all of these other products, you know, this little cottage industry that you're building with these different things going on. And often when I see that with founders in the early stages, the question for me always is like, do you not believe that this first product can be something bigger?
Omer Khan [00:49:35]:
And are you trying to hedge your bets and try to do a bunch of different things? How did you guys end up in that situation?
Jonathan Rhyne [00:49:46]:
And this goes back to the difference between a mom and pop viewpoint of a business versus like a, a growing like you know, investor led company. I think a mom and pop, like, I don't know, you've been to a nice restaurant, maybe they have two restaurants and you're sitting there going, God, you guys should be all over America. This is phenomenal. And they're going like, you know, these two restaurants, to get them up and running. They create a good lifestyle for us.
Jonathan Rhyne [00:50:12]:
We get, you know, we get to go do this, we get some money and why don't we try to not get over our skis, right? So we kind of had that view, like, and the other thing was like, if you think about it, if you go from like 2013 to, you know, essentially 2018, that's five years. And it's like, you know, you get like, well, let's try something else. Let's do something again. Let's. And the thing we did, I think we weren't sure of the size of the TAM at the moment.
Jonathan Rhyne [00:50:41]:
You know, what people don't remember is digital transformation has been a thing that's been going on forever. It just like is the thing that was always on everybody's five year roadmap. It was just always on the five year roadmap. It wasn't until Covid that it was like, oh shit, that we needed to have that yesterday. And so it was kind of steady growth, but not rocket ship growth. And so here we are, arrogant founders. We, we grew business. Let's go for something that goes even faster. And you know, I rocket ship growth.
Jonathan Rhyne [00:51:12]:
And it was, yeah, it was distracting, but it was fun. Like, we got excited by it. It was shots in the arms of motivation. It was cool to see the products we put out. We learned, we learned from it for sure. But we were also still growing the other business kind of sustainably as well. But like, I think one of the big things people don't realize, what's the difference between a mom and pop business and an investor led business is like investor led business.
Jonathan Rhyne [00:51:43]:
You're not taking capital out of the company at the end of the year. Now they're always focused. If anything, you're building cash in the company or you're looking, how can we spend that money? The classic VC question is, if I give you $10 million or $1 million, how can you 10x your business? I mean, that, that's a really big question for people that are just bootstrapped a company. Whereas when you bootstrap a business and you're getting, you're seeing your income go up, man, you want to see that income go up and you're getting comfortable.
Jonathan Rhyne [00:52:15]:
Your lifestyle is growing a little bit. And so you're more conservative with that investment. And so I think that was one of the reasons we did it. Some of it also was. I mean, I can tell you in 2015, I wanted to go to the web, but my webassembly wasn't around. My technical founders were kind of like, yeah, this, we're not gonna, that's gonna, that's gonna take us five years and we need this many people to do it.
Jonathan Rhyne [00:52:45]:
And so we just never considered it it wasn't until later that they, I just said cool, like can you just spend a month and research this and see what's possible? And all of a sudden, lo and behold, hey, I think we found a breakthrough because we have phenomenal engineer that figured it out. So some of that was just tiny. So
Omer Khan [00:53:05]:
you bootstrapped through to 12 million in AR once you got the focus back and continued growing this business and then you raised the private equity money. At that time your two co founders decided that, you know, they were going to cash out. And so you're the one guy left now. And it's not a bootstrap business anymore. It's become that investor driven business and you don't have your co founders. How did life change for you?
Jonathan Rhyne [00:53:44]:
One thing I'll say, and this is not me, like Insight Partners out of New York City is my investor. I was lucky that I literally talked to just about every VC pe, like in the similar sizes they are. And I got to choose who I ultimately went with. And they're a phenomenal investor. They're, they're very founder friendly, they're very growth oriented even with, you know, even in today's market and what's happening tech and SaaS. But it was a big change.
Jonathan Rhyne [00:54:24]:
Some of it was, I mean like, you have to think for the majority of my time at this company, I viewed it as not my company. It was this, our company. I use that word. It's me and my three business partners. I still call them my business partners even though they're not. And that changed. So now it's like, oh man, this is Jonathan's company. Well, that's different. I had, it was a really big education in that first year.
Jonathan Rhyne [00:54:49]:
You got to be able to, you know, a good, I would say investor led leader of a company, whether they're the founder, the CEO, you got to talk two different languages because you're the operator. You know what needs to get done to actually execute the plan. And investors are not operators or investors. They're looking at numbers, metrics and they expect you to tell them what the number of metrics would be and then go, go figure out to it. And it's easy I think in their operator seat to go, oh, those damn investors.
Jonathan Rhyne [00:55:23]:
They don't know about running a business. And I know people that do that. And you'll quickly find out you'll be out of a job because they'll find somebody that, that understands both. And so you kind of get, you kind of get both. Like they have pattern recognition. I mean they have 700 companies in their portfolio. So they're seeing a wide larger range. They have operating leaders and groups. The other thing was, I had a boss like that. That's weird.
Jonathan Rhyne [00:55:54]:
You know, one of the things people love about becoming a Bootstrap founder is I don't have a boss, right? I'm my own boss. And now I had a board. And then really what I found out with is, yeah, I have a boss. They're looking to me still to tell them what to do. They're backing me. So it's not really a similar like, hey, what do you think I should do? Type relationship. It's, I think we should do this. What do you all think?
Jonathan Rhyne [00:56:20]:
And then they look at you and they're like, all right, well, we're okay with you doing that. We're going to look and want to make sure you achieve X, Y and Z. And so it creates, I think, a really healthy bit of accountability because it removes this. Like, it removes this. I'm going to go do this other product that's not in focus with what I'm doing. No, no. Focus on damn core business that's making money.
Jonathan Rhyne [00:56:43]:
And I think sometimes founders become bad business people because either they think they're invincible and everything they can do, they can be do successfully, or they get distracted, or they don't like the word accountability or ownership. They kind of like, well, whether I have a good year or bad year, I own this thing and I'm cool and I'm there. And that's just not the real world when it comes to, you know, what an investor is.
Jonathan Rhyne [00:57:10]:
Investors trying, they're giving you money to grow it, to return money to their shareholders or their LPs, but it was different. It was absolutely different. I had a little bit of anxiety around it, to be frank, and it was good change for me. It wasn't bad change, but, yeah, it was. The other thing was like, we grew so fast. We went from 50 people in 2021 to 100 people, basically by midway through 2022. Sorry, mid. Sorry, beginning of 2023. So over a year, we doubled in size of people.
Jonathan Rhyne [00:57:48]:
And the thing I loved about the smaller business was like, man, like, I'm not the CEO. I'm Jonathan. I'm just. I'm sitting here right next to you, hacking away, trying to get this thing done. We're. We're a family. We're trying to. We're trying to survive. We're in it together. And then when you scale, it kind of becomes like, I mean, I'm running A business. These are my employees and not even so much that I view them that way, but when I walk in a room, it's so shit, everybody gets quiet.
Jonathan Rhyne [00:58:13]:
The big boss just walked in and yet I don't feel like the big boss and I don't want to be the big boss. So yeah, there's definitely things that change.
Omer Khan [00:58:22]:
Yeah, I mean, it's a fascinating journey and kind of going back to the, you know, jumping off the cliff and joining this little startup, doing 20K MRR to, you know, where it is today. It's amazing. I'd love to keep the conversation going, but we should wrap up and get onto the lightning round. So I've got seven quick fire questions for you. You ready?
Jonathan Rhyne [00:58:46]:
Yes, go ahead.
Omer Khan [00:58:47]:
What's one of the best pieces of business advice you've received?
Jonathan Rhyne [00:58:50]:
The best way to answer this is to say, you know, the bad one I have is make your customer. If a customer values something, they'll tell you by paying you for it. So make. Make people pay you for things they value.
Omer Khan [00:59:09]:
What book would you recommend to our audience and why?
Jonathan Rhyne [00:59:12]:
I mean, I have three. I'm a huge reader, so I could probably give you a list or Blue in the Face. I really like the hard things about hard things. It's Ben Horowitz from Andresen Horowitz. I think it just really solves some of the like people issues as you scale up some of the really hard things that you don't anticipate when you're first starting out. I also read this book, Scaling Up How a Few Companies make it and why the Rest Don't. It's a good collection of a lot of books that I think are good.
Jonathan Rhyne [00:59:42]:
When you start thinking about what are core values. Why do I need to do this? What's a bhag? Things like this, I think Zero to One is a classic. It's really fascinating book. It also hits that really what it's like to really live that journey and some of those lessons that everyone goes to me. So sorry, classic books.
Omer Khan [01:00:00]:
But what's one attribute or characteristic in your mind of a successful founder?
Jonathan Rhyne [01:00:05]:
I googled this. The original quote, I told you was Steve Jobs. But you gotta believe you're gonna be successful. And what I mean by that is like, because if you don't think you're gonna be successful, you're not gonna be willing to do what you need to do in the moments where you're not sure whether you're gonna be successful, that will ultimately make you successful. So if you don't have self Belief, you might as well stop because you're not, you're not gonna make it.
Jonathan Rhyne [01:00:27]:
You're not going to have the energy, you're not going to get through the lows. So to me it's like really core that you got to have self belief, you got, you got to something in you, it's got to believe. I'm just going to make this work. So that, that to me, what they call it grid, I'm sure there's a million ways they call it, but that's a belief would be the way I put it.
Omer Khan [01:00:45]:
What's your favorite personal productivity tool or habit?
Jonathan Rhyne [01:00:48]:
Yeah, you know, I'm add, adhd. I'm diagnosed adhd. So when I was, when I was trying to do focus work, it hurts me. But when I'm trying to do context switching and a lot of different jobs, it's actually kind of a superpower. So I'm not one of these people that I have this system.
Jonathan Rhyne [01:01:06]:
But one of the things I've really done since law school is like when you're enthusiastic and you're motivated and you're in the flow and you're having a really good time working on something, do whatever you can to stay, make, stretch that time, don't get up. And then the other one, and probably the key one that I think a lot of people don't think is like, people have bad days. You have a day and you're not, you're not productive. Get the hell up, go do something else. Go walk, go do something you enjoy.
Jonathan Rhyne [01:01:33]:
I don't know, read a book, watch a television show. The last thing you need to do is sit at the damn computer and try to bang something out while you hate it. And you're not doing good work because by you getting up and going to do something else, you'll find you break it up and you might think, return to it, be motivated and get in the flow state. So I really focus on those energy levels and I don't try to make it fit into like a perfect circle, if that makes any sense.
Omer Khan [01:01:57]:
Yeah, yeah, I, I think I'm you, I'm like you. I, I haven't been diagnosed, but I'm pretty sure I have ADHD and struggle a lot with, with focus. And I think that one of the things that I've learned is that when you're having those tough moments, the harder you try, the worse it gets.
Jonathan Rhyne [01:02:17]:
Right.
Omer Khan [01:02:18]:
And to be able to walk away and just do something else until you can re energize yourself, you're going to come back and you might even have the solution to whatever it was you were struggling with. So I think that's great. What's a new or crazy business idea you'd love to pursue if you had the time?
Jonathan Rhyne [01:02:33]:
I joke. There's a really bad joke I have with my family. There's a thing called a grill mirror. And I always thought like if I, you know, if you want the perfect grill marks on the bottom side of your, you know, steak or burger, you can imagine this little dentist thing that goes in and it shows that okay, they're even. So then I flipping an even and I say, that's my million dollar idea. Mothers will buy them for their son in laws with their favorite sports team on them or whatever. That's a jokey one obviously.
Jonathan Rhyne [01:03:01]:
I have three children, young children really care about climate change. It's kind of one of the good side effects of our business is, you know, we really do. We plant trees for, you know, we planted 10 trees per customer last year. I've always thought of like a mint.com for climate change. The idea that if you could then build this tracking system. And I know there's things that try but like the thing that Mint.com does is or did was it listed everything.
Jonathan Rhyne [01:03:28]:
And then you could apply the score and then you could show like, hey, this is my personal impact on climate change. And then if you got the government involved, which I think they will get involved at some point, you can get like, hey, propose to the government, get tax subsidies for people that do this. If you have a good climate record, you get a tap subsidy. If you have a bad climate record, you got to pay extra money or something like this. I don't know, crazy idea.
Jonathan Rhyne [01:03:52]:
I don't know if it ever commercially would work other than that. Like I love, I love stock trading and forex trading. So your part of me thought about just starting a hedge fund.
Omer Khan [01:04:05]:
What's an interesting little fun fact about you that most people don't know?
Jonathan Rhyne [01:04:07]:
I guess you, you pulled out the one that I would kind of say like I was in a, you know, I was an attorney and most people don't think of, you know, a startup founder, let alone a business as an attorney.
Omer Khan [01:04:18]:
And finally, what's one of your most important passions outside of your work?
Jonathan Rhyne [01:04:22]:
Yeah, let me. So I've talked about, I have a wife and you know, three young children. My daughter's, you know, turning 10, my son's seven, my youngest is almost four. So obviously dad time takes up a lot of stuff when I'm not here. I love Soccer, I play soccer. I watch the epl. I'm a huge Arsenal fan. So go Gunners. And then I like golf. I mean, I know these things sound typical, but golf is a perfect sport that is so frustrating to play and you're competing against yourself and it's a mental grind.
Jonathan Rhyne [01:04:52]:
And I think one of the people, like personalities like us that get into entrepreneurship, we like challenges, we want to continue to push ourselves, continue to improve. So golf to me scratches that itch in a non work related setting. But yeah, I would also tell you just last thing with this. I'm not a big believer maybe in this whole like work life balance type thing. And part of the reason I say that is I like to tell people, you know, I went to law school because I wanted to be a good father.
Jonathan Rhyne [01:05:23]:
I picked myself up away from the computer because I want to be a good father and I want to have my kids. I go play soccer and do golf because I have to manage my anxiety levels or I want to be healthy or otherwise. I would sit at the computer all day long and it wouldn't be forced. You know, I love my job. I have literally, I'm living the dream. It's one of the best job I've ever had. I've had a lot of jobs.
Omer Khan [01:05:47]:
So that's a long way away from the days when you were working in Sears, sold cars.
Jonathan Rhyne [01:05:53]:
I've worked in politics, I've done all the jobs everyone hates.
Omer Khan [01:05:56]:
Awesome. Jonathan, thank you so much for joining me and sharing your journey of building this business. If people want to check out the SDK, they can go to pspdfkit.com and if folks want to get in touch with you, what's the best way for them to do that?
Jonathan Rhyne [01:06:14]:
Yeah, hit me up on Twitter. It's jdrhyne is the handle that's probably the easiest way. Or you know, message me on LinkedIn, but you know, I still check Twitter. I'm on Threads as well. Same. Same handle on Threads. So, yeah. And Omer, thank you so much for the opportunity. It was an honor to speak with you.
Omer Khan [01:06:34]:
It was my pleasure. Thank you so much. And I wish you and the team the best of success.
Jonathan Rhyne [01:06:38]:
Awesome. Thank you.
Omer Khan [01:06:39]:
Cheers.
