Everflow: From Selling Just Screenshots to $30M ARR SaaS – with Sam Darawish [459]

Omer Khan [00:00:00]:
Sam, welcome to the show.

Sam Darwish [00:00:01]:
Hi Omer, great to be here. Thanks for having me.

Omer Khan [00:00:04]:
My pleasure. Do you have a favorite quote, something that inspires or motivates you that you can share with us?

Sam Darwish [00:00:09]:
I don't have a particularly favorite quote, but one I've been referencing lately is, I think it was Voltaire or maybe it was Oscar Wilde. Anyway, he said that history doesn't repeat itself, but it rhymes and it's kind of reminds you to kind of understand that what's happening right now probably has happened before and will happen again and just gives you like perspective. It's so not really business related but more just kind of general life that, you know, take it easy and don't freak out.

Omer Khan [00:00:41]:
You know, it's funny, I was talking to somebody about history the other day and like when I was a kid, how much I hated history because what's the point of learning about stuff that happened hundreds of thousands of years ago? And then as I got slightly wiser in my older age, you realize there's so much to learn from history about what's happening today. So yeah.

Sam Darwish [00:01:04]:
Great.

Omer Khan [00:01:05]:
So tell us about Everflow. What does the product do, who's it for and what's the main problem you're helping to solve?

Sam Darwish [00:01:12]:
So everflow is a SaaS product. We call ourselves a partner marketing platform and what that means, it's really for companies, brands, agencies, affiliate networks to really manage all their partner marketing and that includes folks like affiliates, influencers, media buyers, special partnerships and Everflow tracks and manages and automates all of that. So we sell into the marketing team and it's really for performance marketing campaigns that those team set up with their, with their partners. Great.

Omer Khan [00:01:49]:
And give us a sense of the size of the business. Where are you in terms of revenue, customers, size of team?

Sam Darwish [00:01:54]:
Yeah, so we're nearly at 30 million ARR. We are about 120 folks. Our, our engineer team is actually based in Montreal. I'm based in the San Francisco Bay area. But our engineering team is based in Montreal. We have about 30 folks there that are all smarter than me. But the sales, business, development, marketing in us and then we have an office in Amsterdam as well, in Dubai too. 30% of our business is international too and we have about 1200 customers.

Sam Darwish [00:02:26]:
Great.

Omer Khan [00:02:27]:
And you've, you've, you haven't raised any external funding. The business is completely self funded.

Sam Darwish [00:02:32]:
Yeah, the business is self funded. We started in mid-2016. So we're kind of, you know, past nine years now. Coming upon 10 years we had myself and my co founder founders. We Had a previous business called Moolah Media in San Francisco that was an affiliate network and that was also Bootstrap. We were able to sell that to Opera and then started Everflow after that. But it was self funded. We put in about a few hundred thousand dollars in it and it's been kind of growing organically since then.

Omer Khan [00:03:04]:
Yeah. So let's talk a little bit about Moolah Media. Just tell us a little bit about like, you know, how where the idea for that business came from, how you got started and eventually what led to this acquisition with Opera.

Sam Darwish [00:03:19]:
Yeah, so I started working in online marketing and this is like the early 2000s where like people were just trying to figure out like how to bid on Google Search. Like there was like maybe 50 people so we doing that at that time. But so I started working for a company called Adoractive in San Francisco and they were very early on with like affiliate marketing, online marketing, you know, pay per click campaigns and so. But that was all desktop and I worked in that space and specifically around like mortgage lead generation, personal finance. This was very, you know, starting to get traction in kind of the early 2000, mid 2000s. And then the iPhone came out in 2008 and with my two co founders at the time were like, okay, we know there's a bunch of stuff happening on desktop around, you know, Internet marketing. And we're like, we see the same thing happening on, on the mobile now that people actually have a screen that they can, you know, click on and, and view proper ads. So, so we, we created Moolah Media with that and we created one of the first kind of mobile affiliate networks.

Sam Darwish [00:04:27]:
And affiliate network is, you know, it's, it's a, there's lots of them where essentially it's different advertisers who, it's a network that aggregates advertisers demand and allows different publishers and to get access to that. So we created that and we're able to bootstrap that. We had an internal kind of tracking platform because there wasn't really any third party software to handle mobile. So we developed a lot of internal technology there and then Opera, which is a browser and it was very popular on mobile phones. They kind of wanted to monetize a lot of their mobile phone traffic, especially in international Geos. And so that's why they acquired us because we were basically monetizing a lot of inventory, mobile inventory. It was, it was a good acquisition like 50 million for a bootstrap company. We did a three year earn out and you know, stayed there to 2016.

Sam Darwish [00:05:22]:
And then that's when we left and created Everflow and Everflow as opposed to Mula. Mula was just really an ad network. Everflow was. We're like, okay, we're just going to focus on the SaaS. There was a bunch of incumbent players that were kind of in department marketing, affiliate marketing software, and you know, just knowing, knowing the space and talking to different people, we realized, well, nobody really loves those solutions. Like, there was constantly complaining about these steps. And we're like, okay, can we bring in a better SaaS for this industry?

Omer Khan [00:05:53]:
I'm curious which, which way around did this happen? Was it you decided, okay, Earnout is done, I've got, I want to work on another startup. Let me go and look for ideas. Or was it the idea came and then you started looking into what that opportunity looked like?

Sam Darwish [00:06:11]:
No, the idea was, I think the idea was developed there just because, you know, we were seeing what was happening in the market where people were. A lot of advertisers wanted better tracking and, you know, when I say tacking tracking of performance campaign, it's, you know, it's like clicks, the conversion. But even beyond conversions or installs or whatever, just downstream events. So we saw a lot of need that the market was going in that direction. So, yeah, to answer your question, the idea was kind of born there. And we're like, okay, after we're done with the earnout, you have a choice. You can continue to work at Opera or you go do something else. And after three years, we're like, okay, let's go do something else.

Sam Darwish [00:06:51]:
Basically.

Omer Khan [00:06:52]:
How much time did you spend on validating the idea? Because it sounds like you were already, you know, you were in the space, you're already sort of validating it. So when you got to the point where you were like, okay, we're going to pull the trigger, we're going to do this. Was it like, let's start building the product because we know enough about this space?

Sam Darwish [00:07:11]:
Yeah, we did, but I think we knew what needed to happen at a high level, but not the details. So mid 2016s, we're done with opera, and me and my two co founders, we started working on this. As mentioned, we put in a few hundred thousand of our own. So we hired a couple of engineers as well. But really the first six, seven months was just, I would say R and D with betas, with beta customers. So it's not even. It was just folks that I knew from the industry, like other competitors of Moolah, people at, like, you Know, different affiliate networks and basically asking them, you know, they, they were using. There were some legacy platforms or they're still alive.

Sam Darwish [00:08:01]:
Those platforms, like companies like Tune and Cake that, that are competitors to our. And we're just like, okay, what, you know, we know that you don't love this product. What would you like to see? Kind of, you know, so there was a lot of six, that six, seven months of before we even kind of launched our first product in early 2017. It was just a lot of feedback from, you know, you can call them prospects, I guess. So that's what we did, essentially.

Omer Khan [00:08:32]:
You mentioned that you put in, the three of you put in about 400,000 into the business, and you told me earlier that you didn't pay yourselves for the first couple of years. That's a very different picture to what maybe I imagined where you have. You sell Mula Media $50 million. Yeah, we're going to be more generous. We're going to put more money into the business. We'll be able to pay ourselves. But it sounded like you carried over that bootstrapped mentality right away from day one into this new business. Is that right?

Sam Darwish [00:09:08]:
Yeah, and part of it is, I guess we were used to it, so that was how things were operating. But what was interesting, though is that Opera was also a public company. So, you know, when we got acquired, we kind of went straight to like, kind of how public company operates, which is like every three months, revenue, earnings, whatever. So, but, but. And in being a public company, there was a big focus on profitability. So it's not. We moved from a bootstrapped company that was, you had to kind of focus to a public, you know, company that was also focused on profitability. So it kind of carried over.

Sam Darwish [00:09:45]:
But the, but yeah, the. I think part of it was kind of. Yeah. In our DNA. But also, you know, let's say. Let's say Instead of putting 400,000, we were to put in 4 million. Like, I don't think that necessarily helps you right up front, especially when you don't know exactly what you're doing. You kind of have a general idea.

Sam Darwish [00:10:05]:
So. And I think also scarcity of capital and resources forces you early on to kind of just really focus on what matters. Right. Like, you know, you have, you know, you have many directions you can go in, but, you know, when you have only 400,000 and, you know, a couple of engineers that are kind of helping you, like, you only you have to kind of get it right, like pretty quickly. Right. So, like, for example, I'll give you another example. We decided to go with Google Cloud, you know, as our hosting provider right away instead of Amazon. And there was a couple of reasons for that.

Sam Darwish [00:10:42]:
Even though at that time GCP was still not as developed. But they seem to be more focused on advertising, obviously considering Google's background. And so the structure of it, like, we wanted a lot of data analytics for the different types of advertising campaigns and did that. But the. What it also forced it to do is like, okay, instead of being kind of very generous with our Google Cloud bill and just not really optimizing things, like you really just use what's necessary. And I think that forces you to build things in a very efficient way too.

Omer Khan [00:11:20]:
Yeah, I bet. So 2016 was sort of learning time. 2017, you launched the first version of the product. What did you decide to focus on? So you know the competitive landscape better now you know what people are unhappy with about the existing products. So where did you decide to focus on with the product? And who was your target market? Who was your ICP at that point?

Sam Darwish [00:11:52]:
So our ICP was basically just affiliate networks, um, which is not a big market. And even within affiliate networks, I would say it was just mobile affiliate networks, just because we knew that space really well. So we just went after those folks that they had very, there was, there was their, the, the products that were using, they had like key reporting issues and also, for example, around fraud reporting issues, around performance and stuff that they were just not getting. So we're really focused on those kind of features that we knew would get us in the door for some of these big mobile affiliate networks. So at a high level, a pretty small TAM with a very specific feature set that can win, I think. Very specific. So we took a very targeted approach rather than a very broad approach where you kind of like put it out there and see who comes.

Omer Khan [00:12:55]:
It wasn't that, but it wasn't some, you know, like you went off and did like a whole bunch of analysis and figured out, this is the icp, this is the market. It was more about an intuitive thing where this is a space we know the best.

Sam Darwish [00:13:09]:
We know best and we think we can get 10, 20 customers that will pay us. That will get us to, let's say, you know, 100, 200,000 MRR, you know, so that was it. You were just kind of like trying to solve for that initial set of people.

Omer Khan [00:13:25]:
Basically tell me how you landed your first customer and how easy or hard.

Sam Darwish [00:13:32]:
It was to close that deal the first. So another thing that we did. So again, 2016. We're kind of doing a lot of R and D, talking to potential customers. And, you know, a lot of them, some of them would take us seriously, some wouldn't. Some would be like, well, you know, we like you guys, and it seems like you're doing something cool, but come back, like, in two years when you have, like, 30 customers, like, we're not going to be, you know, your testing ground here. So. Which is fine.

Sam Darwish [00:14:04]:
I mean, I think you. You want all that feedback, right? But our first set of customers. So we went. There's a. There's a conference in Las Vegas called Affiliate Summit that's held every year in January. And we decided to actually have a booth there. And, you know, it's like five, six thousand dollars. So it's a big expense, I guess, at the time.

Sam Darwish [00:14:24]:
Right. But that was our marketing, and we didn't really have a product, but we decided, okay, we had some screenshots, we had sort of an mvp. And we're like, okay, let's go there and just, you know, have a screen with. With, you know, with that. Some, you know, just portions of, like, what our software is going to look like and see what kind of interest we get. And we actually were able to get two prospects from that that became customers. And they knew, you know, they weren't happy with their solution, but they knew they were also taking a risk on us. In fact, one of them made us sign a thing where basically, you know, in case that we go down, that they would basically take over the software from us.

Sam Darwish [00:15:14]:
You know, that's the level of, you know, lack of trust at that point, because, you know, you have zero brand equity. But it's, you know, the opportunity is that they're not happy with their current platform, so. And you focus on the features that will make a difference for them.

Omer Khan [00:15:33]:
Basically, you know, I talk to founders who are very reluctant to go and talk to a potential customer and show them screenshots. It's like, I have to show them a product. I have to show them something that's working. And maybe today in the world of AI, sure, maybe you can get further faster and so on, but it's a whole different ball game to get a booth at a big event, have set up there, and people are coming along. It's like, yeah, give me a demo. And I'm like, yeah, here's a screenshot. So just help us think, just understand your mindset there, because I think that what you did was great. It led to customers.

Omer Khan [00:16:15]:
But why do you think so many people are reluctant to do something like that.

Sam Darwish [00:16:20]:
So I can tell you that I think hardcore engineers are always reluctant because being a good engineer, a great engineer, you want to produce a perfect product. Right. The whole concept of putting something out that's kind of janky that for, for someone to look at is I think, kind of against the nature of a really good engineer. Right. Like. However, on the flip side, I would say as a marketer or a business development, like, you want that immediate feedback. Right. Because you could be going down like some weird rabbit hole with your product.

Sam Darwish [00:16:52]:
Right. So I think the reluctance comes from the fear that like, this is not.

Omer Khan [00:16:57]:
That great or people, or people will look at it and say a screenshot and it'll be so underwhelming they won't be interested.

Sam Darwish [00:17:04]:
Yeah, but you also want that feedback. I mean, like, I think, I think, I think, I think a lot of founders and very smart engineers I think get into develop, do that mistake where they will spend like months or even years developing an amazing product, but they're never that, that, that customer interaction or feedback is missing. So I think, you know, we were also three co founders and I'm the believer that I think you want to get feedback as quickly as possible because you're never going to learn what people want in a kind of being isolated. And nothing better than going to a conference where there's just hundreds of people in the space walking around and some of them are going to be like, well, this is crap. I'm not going to waste my time. But you're going to get a few people. They're gonna be like, well, hey, I'll give you my card. Let's talk later.

Sam Darwish [00:18:01]:
You know, and they'll, they'll give you feedback.

Omer Khan [00:18:04]:
I'm curious, did you get any negative feedback from anybody because you showed them a screenshot instead of working code?

Sam Darwish [00:18:09]:
We didn't really. No. Nobody really gives you negative feedback. I think some people recognize like this is early on and, and so, and some of them eventually became customers like three years down the road. Like, you know, they, we went into a couple people's offices and too, they're like. And they were very upfront about it. Like, you know, we know you, we like you and this is great. But like, we're not our businesses too.

Sam Darwish [00:18:33]:
Yeah. Because there's, and especially in our business, there's a lot of like revenue and money flowing. Right. So, you know, people are, this is a customer acquisition for, for a lot of companies. So they even just migrating is a, is a huge risk for them. Yeah. Great.

Omer Khan [00:18:47]:
Okay. So the event leads to your first two customers. Where did you find those next eight? Like getting to those first 10 customers.

Sam Darwish [00:18:57]:
So the. So you know how I mentioned like the six, seven months we had a kind of a list of. We were calling them beta, but people who are just kind of giving us feedback. So we kind of stayed in touch with them and kept on. And as the product kind of came out in Q1, we started sharing, you know, like a trial with, with some of those folks. And they were also, they felt like they were invested in the process as well too. So a lot of them were, you know, happy to join, kind of like that trial. And some of them became customers as well.

Sam Darwish [00:19:39]:
Our, I would say our first like big customers came towards the end of 2017, early 2018. And you know, we had some traction at that point. You know, we had like, I think 10, 20 customers and the. But they weren't like huge customers, but we got like some big ones early on in 2018 just because we focused on some features that some of our customers really wanted. The other thing that we did is we actually developed an API to migrate from the legacy platforms to us as well. And that really helped with the transition too.

Omer Khan [00:20:22]:
I want to talk a little bit about. You went into a market and you focused on a niche where there weren't a huge number of competitors. I think you said there were three or four at the time, but generally in the affiliate sort of space and these sort of solutions, there was lots of them out there at the time and many of them don't exist today. What did you do to differentiate yourself and this product from everything else in the crowd that helped you to get attention, but also not to kind of get sucked into this commoditization sort of trap.

Sam Darwish [00:21:00]:
So I think for us from the beginning, the space, I would say there was many competitors, but it was fairly fragmented in that different solutions focus, I would say, on different verticals or different portions of the market. So for example, there's ones that are really good for retail and E commerce, but there's other ones that are good for lead generation campaigns. And then some, I would say are more enterprise, like with SoC2 compliance and sophisticated. And some are kind of, you know, let's say a $50 per month type of software. Right. We knew we didn't want to be in the like 50 to $100. Like our, our software on average costs about $2,000 per month or like say 25k per year. Like that's our average ACV.

Sam Darwish [00:21:51]:
Some pay more, so obviously. But it's we knew that we wanted to be more in the kind of like mid market to enterprise space. So and we knew that we wanted to kind of develop I guess the most sophisticated from a technology standpoint. One of the things that we also decided to do early on is kind of build out, do an API first where we built our UI on top of our API, but also integrate with a lot of different products out there like Shopify, other E commerce platforms, et cetera. So that was always the approach, kind of enterprise API first integrate with a lot of the others and we're still kind of true to that. So we just focused on that and kind of stayed with that.

Omer Khan [00:22:43]:
So the product launch is 2017. You get your first customers pretty quickly. How long did it take to hit the first million in ARR?

Sam Darwish [00:22:54]:
So the first million ARR I think was early 2018 and the size of the team was about like 10 people including the three founders. And that's when I think we actually turned a profit too. And it wasn't a huge amount of customers as well, it was only like 20, 25, 30 customers. So again we focused on kind of like bigger customers that we knew and that were basically a great product market fit for us.

Omer Khan [00:23:26]:
So you initiated on this niche market and then at some point you decided to expand, find a bigger market. And I think you were looking at like direct sort of brands. Tell me about that because I think that was, that's the sort of a transition that many founders make and you've had your own challenges doing that. So just tell me about like why you decided to do that. Like why was it this market you picked and then what have been some of the struggles along the way in terms of, you know, getting some traction there.

Sam Darwish [00:24:07]:
Yeah, so the, for us the, we focused on the affiliate network market and you know, at a high level the TAM there I would say is like 70 million. So it's not, it's not a big market, the direct brand market and there's players, you probably heard of them like Impact and Commission Junction and awin, that's their market. Like you know, a high level I would say is maybe 700 million to maybe a billion. So it's a much bigger market. So we, you know, once we, you know, we did, we got a lot of traction in the affiliate network market. You know, we, we got to 10 million I think within three, four years or so. So you know, and, but it was all kind of those type of customers and at that point I think you have to make a decision. You're like okay, do we, you know, do we continue in this niche market? And let's say even if we capture 50 of that market, you're a 35 million dollar company.

Sam Darwish [00:24:59]:
Right. And maybe that's a great, that could be a great lifestyle business as well. It's like, okay, because you know, you're not gonna, you're not gonna go like public at that level with that tam. So it's like, yeah, you have a choice and but you know, we're like, well it's not as, you know, it's not that fun that, not you know, it's more fun to like actually go for a bigger thing. Right. So let's just do that. So, so that's what we knew we had to kind of go towards that larger brand market. And the other thing within affiliate marketing, what was happening is like in kind of the rise of influencers as well.

Sam Darwish [00:25:36]:
So a lot of influencers were coming kind of becoming the new affiliates. So we, which was exciting. We were seeing a lot of like for example health and wellness companies, financial services, e commerce companies starting to move towards being, you know, not just affiliates but influencers for their performance campaigns. So it's kind of like an exciting thing to get into as well. So, and so we've made that transition. So now we've serviced both segments. I would say we're still in that transition just because our product was a great product market fit for affiliate networks. But it's still, we're still kind of adjusting it for brands and we have a lot of big brands that use us now.

Sam Darwish [00:26:17]:
But the product didn't translate 100% over. And I would say we're still kind of in that transition.

Omer Khan [00:26:27]:
Give me one example of that, like how a product that was working well in a niche market suddenly you discover a bunch of problems with when you move it to an adjacent market.

Sam Darwish [00:26:42]:
Yeah. So I think it's one thing is the different types of users. So with affiliate networks like we were typically selling into an affiliate network company where like the whole company ran on our software. So the every like let's say they had 20 employees. All their 20 employees would be users of the product. Right. Because that was their business essentially. So we were kind of a, an ERP or a backbone of that company.

Sam Darwish [00:27:06]:
On the brand side it was different. It was like you have a marketing team. The marketing team will have, you know, someone in charge of paid media, someone in charge of brand, then they'll have someone in charge of partner marketing, affiliate. And it's one or two people. It could be a Massive brand, but they only have like one or two people, so they typically the resources are not the same. So we found that a lot of the users were under resourced and they needed more automation, they needed like a lot more training on the product. Another example is in payments. So with our product, the brand or the network typically issues the invoice for the affiliate at the end of the month in terms of how much is owed to them in commissions.

Sam Darwish [00:27:56]:
With affiliate networks in that segment, they were managing the payments internally because they had to have a finance team and they would just do that on the brand side. They wanted all of our product to just take care of the payments. Just because if you have a thousand influencers, you know, you don't want to cut a check for each one of them. You want to be able to pay through the platform directly. So that was an example of like feature functionality that was needed for that space that we didn't have on in the previous segment.

Omer Khan [00:28:24]:
So how big of an issue were these differences creating? Was this like, okay, you know, we have a product, we can sell the product in this new market, but it's still rough around the edges because of these differences or was it like we have a major churn issue here?

Sam Darwish [00:28:43]:
The churn I would say is higher, but it's not a completely off. Right? It's not, you know, there's retention because again, users are under resourced. They're, they're, you know, it's like one guy versus 20 and you, they're, they're also. There's a lot more demands on that user in a within a brand than if they're just managing an affiliate network. So yes, there's more churn, but like, I don't think it was that big of a churn that it's like, okay, this, like we have to redesign the product entirely kind of thing.

Omer Khan [00:29:18]:
I want to talk a little bit about the approach that you've taken to building this business. You could have done a whole bunch of external stuff, hired pr, done a bunch of founder led stuff, which everyone says you have to be doing, getting on podcasts, which is something that you've recently started doing. But for most of the time building Everflow, you weren't doing that sort of stuff. You were basically keeping your head down and building these either through partner marketing or through network and just building this business quietly and getting it to a point now where it's 30 million in ARR. And I kind of joked with you earlier that it was kind of like the unglamorous path to building a SaaS business for a founder. Just tell me about why. Was that an intentional decision you made to do it that way?

Sam Darwish [00:30:18]:
Yeah, I think it was intentional. Again, when you, when you're focused on profitability and being bootstrapped, it's the, the priorities shift from like, we have a bunch of customers and you have to satisfy those customers to like, kind of other activities. So, I mean, I think it was just, it's just part of the DNA of the company that way. Um, like, I'm, I'm also a believers in capital efficiency as well. That, you know, any company, you know, whatever size of the company, whether it's small company, large company, like having a capital efficient foundation to the company is kind of like the strength of that company. Right? Because, you know, sometimes the good times, sometimes there's bad. I mean, there's, you know, when, you know, when there's a market correction, I think having a lot of cash in the bank, having, being profitable, I mean, those are kind of the foundations of what a company is. So your job as a CEO is like, really to protect the company as well, you know, and make sure it has the capital kind of to survive, basically.

Omer Khan [00:31:29]:
And on that note, I mean, your average revenue per employee is like super healthy. Like, you know, if you're 30 million ARR. And 120 people, it's like, what, averaging around like 250,000 per employee, which is amazing. But does it, does it also. So that backs up being super efficient with how you run the business. Does that also create challenges?

Sam Darwish [00:31:51]:
It does create challenges because, you know, I think there's always the temptation to, to want to invest in certain areas or, or, you know, kind of. You could also become like too capital efficient, I think, as well. Right. Like, I think you have to. You also have to realize, okay, like, for example, for us, like, our growth rate is, you know, it's. It's not massive. It's. I would say it's like 25, 30% per year.

Sam Darwish [00:32:23]:
It's a decent growth rate. But, you know, you could al. You could be like, well, we could be less capital efficient. Or let's say take external funding, take that growth rate from 30 to, let's say 50 or 60%. Right. You know, I think, you know, it's not necessarily the best strategy. Like, because I think sometimes a healthy kind of moderate growth is better than a very aggressive kind of fast growth. You know, because when you're growing super fast, you're also taking on a lot of customers that may be pulling you in multiple directions.

Sam Darwish [00:32:55]:
You're getting kind of spread a little thin. And that's happened to us. You know, it's not, you know, it's. We've. We've taken on things that were clearly not, let's say, in our icp. And, you know, you waste like six, seven months on trying to get a customer up and running, and it doesn't work, right?

Omer Khan [00:33:09]:
So, yeah, that's always this horrible sinking feeling, right? Just spent six months building this amazing thing to realize it was a waste of time. All right, we should wrap up. Let's get onto the lightning round. So I've got seven quick fire questions for you.

Sam Darwish [00:33:27]:
All right?

Omer Khan [00:33:28]:
What's one of the best pieces of business advice you've received?

Sam Darwish [00:33:32]:
So, best piece of. I don't know who gave me this advice or if I, like, you know, gleaned it from somewhere. But, you know, I. I think the. One of the things I see is a lot of very smart founders, I think, give up too early, right? You know, one of the. One of the biggest, I think, attributes of a good entrepreneur is just persistence, right? Like, you know, just staying in the game, right? It's, you know, you don't have to be the smartest. I think you don't have to be like. But I think persistence carries a lot, right? Because at some point, you'll figure out something, right? So, you know, I think that's.

Sam Darwish [00:34:12]:
That's one advice that I've stuck with is just like, just keep at it. Eventually, you know, you'll get it.

Omer Khan [00:34:18]:
What book would you recommend to our audience and why?

Sam Darwish [00:34:21]:
So one book I read recently was Ron Shea. He's. He's the founder of Panera. And I know it's got nothing to do with SaaS, and it's not an industry, but his hero, he wrote a book called It's Know what Matters. And he just describes the journey of building Panera, which is, you know, a restaurant chain, as a startup public company, then being acquired by Vadi. It just. The book kind of outlines the whole business cycle of a business. And again, I think businesses are businesses, whether they're a restaurant, whether it's a SaaS business.

Sam Darwish [00:34:54]:
Fundamentals are the same. So I'd recommend anybody to read that. Totally.

Omer Khan [00:34:57]:
I think that's a great one. I mean, you can read the heck out of, like, books about SaaS and then read something about Panera Red and get that one insight that you needed to do something with your business. You kind of already answered this, but what's one attribute or characteristic in your mind of a successful founder? Maybe aside from persistence, aside from persistence.

Sam Darwish [00:35:19]:
I think really you have to be willing to. You have to be willing to live with the unknown. Right. You know, it's. Things are not like. And I think this is an attribute of our society in general right now, is that people expect things to be like the way they are and control them. Right. And that's not going to be the case.

Sam Darwish [00:35:43]:
Like, you have to be willing to live with uncertainty. Right. Whether it's positive or negative. Right. Like, you. You just have to be able to deal that. And how you deal with that is, I think, is probably the biggest reason for your success. Right.

Omer Khan [00:35:57]:
What's your favorite personal productivity tool or habit?

Sam Darwish [00:36:00]:
One thing that I do just started doing it kind of naturally, maybe a few years ago, is just Sunday night. I will just. I just have a small book and I just. I organize myself on a weekly basis because I think doing it daily is too much, but weekly is, I think, fine, where I just write down, like, the three, four things I need to achieve. I want to achieve that week, Sunday night, and that's it. No more than three, no more than four. I think it sets enough of a, you know, goal for yourself that's, you know, that's not unattainable, but it's also realistic. And I just write that down every week.

Sam Darwish [00:36:41]:
And I just. That's, that's, that's helped me really just focus on those things for that week. Right.

Omer Khan [00:36:47]:
Cool. What's a new or crazy business idea you'd love to pursue if you had the time?

Sam Darwish [00:36:53]:
You know, I haven't thought about a lot of business ideas. One thing that I'm kind of fascinated, I mean, obviously everybody's talking about AI, and I love music, and, you know, I listen to music a lot. And I know that, like, AI suggests a lot of music for you. I have this, and I think it's a stupid idea, but I have this thing where I think you can, you know, you know how you have DJ sets with, like, a lot of people? I think you can, instead of the DJs, actually replace it with an AI that just kind of feeds on what people are feeling at that time and comes up with a track.

Omer Khan [00:37:27]:
Doesn't sound stupid to me at all. It sounds like a good idea. What's an interesting or fun fact about you that most people don't know?

Sam Darwish [00:37:36]:
So, fun fact about me, I. I do have a black belt in taekwondo, which I got a long time ago when I. When I was 15. And so, yeah, I did Taekwondo in my teenage years. But that's. That's where I peaked. And it's been downhill since then.

Omer Khan [00:37:53]:
And finally, what's one of your most important passions outside of your work?

Sam Darwish [00:37:57]:
So I. So, you know, I'm busy with my work. I also have three kids as well that are twins that are 11 and a 7 year old. So, you know, I don't have a lot of time for outside things, but I do love weightlifting. I do try to do at least three, four times a week. And it really helps with. I feel like I get into kind of a meditating type of stage when I'm doing it, like listening to music and it just really helps, I think, defocus yourself from what else you've been worried about.

Omer Khan [00:38:27]:
Yeah, I love that. I think somebody told me a similar story about Rick Rubin, who's this music producer has produced I don't know how many Grammy winning kind of songs. And the guy is like, he doesn't care about the songs. He's like, what you do is it's all about getting into the flow state. And then however you do that and most of the time it's not sitting in front of your laptop. Right. As we know. And then the songs take care of themselves.

Omer Khan [00:39:01]:
And there's this sort of meditative state you talked about, I think just reminded me of that. So it's kind of pretty cool. All right, great. Well, Sam, thank you so much for joining me. It's been a pleasure. I know there was a lot to unpack in a very short space of time. The journey that's almost 10 years, nine years so far. But I appreciate you sharing your insights and your lessons along the way.

Omer Khan [00:39:26]:
If people want to learn about Everflow, they can go to Everflow IO. And if folks want to get in touch with you, what's the best way for them to do that?

Sam Darwish [00:39:35]:
You can just email me samverflow IO.

Omer Khan [00:39:38]:
Awesome. Thank you so much. It's been a pleasure.

Sam Darwish [00:39:40]:
Thanks, Omar. Really appreciate it.

Omer Khan [00:39:42]:
Yeah. And I wish you and the team the best of success.

Sam Darwish [00:39:46]:
Yes, likewise.

Omer Khan [00:39:47]:
Cheers.