Omer (00:11.840)
Welcome to another episode of the SaaS Podcast.
I'm your host, Omer Khan, and this is the show where I interview proven founders and industry experts who share their stories, strategies, and insights to help you build, launch, and grow your SaaS business.
Today's episode is an interview with a guy who bootstrapped a business which is now doing over $10 million a year.
And his customers include companies like PayPal, Docker, and Cisco, just to name a few.
But this isn't an overnight success story.
It took him over 10 years to get to where he is today, and he had plenty of ups and downs along the way, which we talk about.
But what I really love most about today's interview is the importance of persistence and not giving up.
You know, we often hear these stories about people who had this amazing overnight success and, you know, had a hugely successful exit.
And, you know, it seemed like everything just came together for them while the rest of us were out there struggling every day to build our businesses.
And so when.
What I love about this interview is that it's a reminder that, you know, there are very few overnight success stories and quite often it's a long journey that we all have to take.
But if you keep going down that road and you believe in your idea, then you can succeed.
Well, not always, but you can succeed.
All right.
Today's guest is the co founder and CEO of MindTouch, a social knowledge based product that powers help centers and improves customer engagement and success for its clients.
Its clients include companies such as Zenefits, Docker, PayPal, Accenture, Charles Schwab, just to name a few.
MindTouch was founded in 2004 and is a multimillion dollar business, profitable and has been bootstrapped from day one.
My guest was previously at Microsoft in the Advanced Strategies and Policies group, and he's helped to inform national education policy at the White House.
And he's been a contributing editor writer at cnn, Fortune, and Forbes magazine.
So today I'd like to welcome Aaron Fulkerson.
Aaron, welcome to the show.
Aaron Fulkerson (02:37.110)
Hi.
Thanks so much for having me, Omer.
I really appreciate it.
Omer (02:40.070)
All right, so let's start with a success quote.
Something I like to ask my guests.
What, what drives them, what gets them out of bed in the mornings?
Some people like to share a quote, other people just say, look, I am not a quotes guy.
I just, this is what drives me.
So, what gets you out of bed in the morning?
Aaron Fulkerson (03:00.720)
I can't think of a quote off the top of my head, but the thing that I get most excited and emotional about is seeing people whom I've helped in some way had a positive impact on in some way.
In fact, that's what gets me most excited about with mindtouch is I have the good fortune of being able to see the extended family of MindTouch, our customers that we help.
But more immediately, the individuals at MindTouch whom we've hired that have had their careers put on a rocket as a result of working with us.
From our QA manager that when we met him was a server at the Karl Strauss Brewery half a block away, now runs the QA team to gosh.
One of the very first guys that MindTouch hired, Damian Howley.
He was a graphic designer and his first job out of College started at MindTouch, went on through several roles at MindTouch, was a VP of Customer Success, and recently got poached by a Silicon Valley unicorn to go work with them, where he's making somewhere in the order of $400,000 a year off.
From humble beginnings as a graphic designer at MindTouch, those are the things that get me really excited, is being of service to people.
That's what gets me excited.
Omer (04:26.990)
That's great.
Let's get a little bit clearer about what exactly mindtouch is.
So I kind of gave a brief description about this social knowledge base, but can you break it down for us?
Just tell us in your own words what the product is and what it actually does.
Aaron Fulkerson (04:45.790)
What MindTouch does is we take the content that any company is required to create.
These are things like user manuals for product documentation or customer support content that help users post sale to become successful with a product.
And we turn that into a customer engagement channel on the web and mobile devices for our clients to be able to turn their users into experts.
It's an interesting space because most people don't realize this Whirlpool, Remington, these are customers of ours.
They're ones that are easy to reference because if I talked about like Salesforce or SAP, which are customers of MindTouch as well, it might be harder to imagine.
But just picture like Whirlpool and Remington, and they produce all these PDF user manuals that nobody really reads.
They have to do that for legal compliance reasons.
And the information in those files are really helpful to prospective buyers and also that company because, let's say Remington, they launched Mind Touch and in the first year they tripled their website traffic with the content that previously nobody was reading it was in a user manual.
And then the second year they tripled their website traffic again.
And the people who are accessing the information are 48% customers, 62% buyers.
So these are people at the point of purchase trying to figure out what's the difference between this model and that model.
And they're looking at the documentation to make a purchasing decision.
But it's also very helpful post sale for users so that they become experts on the products or services and then brand promoters.
Omer (06:23.420)
Got it.
So what about some of these maybe more recent businesses like Docker, what kind of content do they have that sort of fits in the model that you just described?
Aaron Fulkerson (06:39.870)
Sure, Docker, obviously they're one of these unicorn software companies that are valued at over a billion dollars or Zenefits mindtouch powers.
If you go to like, I think it's help.zenefits.com that's a commonly accessed interface that an end user would consume information about how to use Zenefits products.
But it also layers into the Zenefits products themselves.
So when you click on help buttons inside the application, there's content that helps the user understand what it is that they're looking at inside the application.
So as the users interact with all this content that's delivered by MindTouch, what we do is we use machine learning to automatically organize and optimize the organization of the content into related clusters.
But the other thing is, Prior to using MindTouch, what were they using?
They might have used like an agent knowledge base and then they had a bunch of PDFs out there and maybe a custom built website.
But MindTouch, what we do is we take all of that kind of documentation, which Docker could be API documentation or whatever, Zenefits it could be end user documentation.
And by virtue of them authoring and publishing it in MindTouch or migrating existing content into MindTouch, we unpack it from what would have been, let's say it's 100 page PDF and we convert it into 1000 pages of web content that gets automatically optimized.
And then of course it's mobile, responsive and delivered across the entire customer journey in product, inside call center, inside the agents ticketing.
So it's a different approach to an old problem that when you think about it, it's like, well of course I've already paid for all this content and nobody accesses it and I'm required to deliver this content.
Then why aren't we doing that?
It's one of these obvious things that until you think about it or see it, is not so obvious.
Omer (08:29.400)
So I'm looking@help.zenefits.com so that entire site is powered by MindTouch?
Aaron Fulkerson (08:36.040)
That's correct, yeah.
So think about the success center or help Center.
That's MindTouch.
Then the same content that powers that gets layered across the customer journey.
And here's the thing that go to support.remington.com you see a bunch of shotguns, right?
Well, prior to MindTouch, what that was was a bunch of PDFs instead of web pages.
So we are taking and delivering to our customers the ability to understand, connect and understand their users.
So now Remington knows which are the products that their customers prefer by geographic region with demographic data.
And also it helps the customers to become experts with the product and the buyers to get information during the education cycle that informs them as to why they should buy a product from Zenefits or ADP or Docker.
Omer (09:34.180)
Got it.
So.
So this is much more than just some kind of, as you talked about, like some, some software to, to track or store help documentation, right?
I mean that's kind of like a very simple way of solving the problem.
And what you guys are doing, you've turned it sort of into not just something that can help existing customers, but can also be a marketing channel for prospective new customers.
And you provide a bunch of data and insights to help your clients get smarter about servicing both existing and new customers through that.
Aaron Fulkerson (10:14.330)
Yeah, you nailed it.
The customers that we serve are originally it was mostly software companies because we understood software since we're a software company.
But it's grown to anybody from manufacturers like Whirlpool who have brands like KitchenAid, MayTag, to manufacturers of luxury RVs like NewMar, to outdoor sporting companies like Remington that do outdoor equipment.
They get a lot of value out of their existing content that they are already producing by either authoring and publishing it at Minetouch or migrating what they have today into.
Into MindTouch.
And then they.
It's all about just creating a connection and understanding with their end users, while at the same time helping their end users to become successful with their products.
Omer (11:02.320)
Now I want to talk about how you came up with the idea for this product.
But before we do that, I want to talk a little bit about life at Microsoft and how you ended up joining the company and sort of eventually the journey you took to get to this idea.
And so where did this start?
How did you end up joining Microsoft?
Aaron Fulkerson (11:26.680)
I'm glad you bring it up because I met my co founder from MindTouch at Microsoft too, Steve, and a great friend of mine, my closest friend other than my wife.
I Started at Microsoft.
I was at Chapel Hill doing my degree in Applied Mathematics, Computer Science.
And I got recruited into a team at Microsoft that worked for the Chief Strategy Officer who then was Craig Mundy.
And it was a small team, 14 people.
And I interviewed with Steve, who's my co founder here, and there's a couple of other people I met.
And then I went out and I started my first week there and I discovered to my shock and horror that in my team was Chuck Thacker, who's the guy who did the first graphical user interface@XEROX PARC.
He's also a touring award winner.
And also in my team was Henrik Friestick Nielsen who worked on HTTP@CERN.
He's got credit on HTP.
So I think a lot of people, I think experience this.
My reaction was like, oh my God, they're going to figure out I'm a fraud.
What am I doing in this group?
And I think that's something that entrepreneurs, at least rational, sane ones, probably grapple with.
I know that after Microsoft, when Steve and I decided to start MindTouch, I dealt with it here for many years where I'm like, oh my gosh, at any point somebody's gonna throw back the curtain and figure out that I'm just a fraud.
I mean, maybe I experience it more than others because I grew up poor, you know, on a farm and then backpack the US as a, as a smelly, long haired hippie.
I don't know.
I think that I tend to believe though that most people in particular most entrepreneurs probably go through that I'm a fraud.
And I think it's an interesting topic for your audience because if you believe that too strongly then you're just, you're never going to achieve or succeed in, you're achieving your goals.
Omer (13:33.180)
Yeah, that's a really interesting point.
And it's something that I think, I agree everybody struggles with to some degree or another.
And I think even with me, I spent 14 years at Microsoft, you know, I didn't go to college.
And so, you know, somehow I still ended up at Microsoft.
And at a point I got to where, you know, I was interviewing people who, you know, these super smart people coming from places like Stanford and you know, Yale and whatever.
And I was just like, how can I, you know, it was that same, same feeling.
It's like I feel like I'm this fraud.
It's like, how can I be here?
How can I be interviewing these people?
And that was like after like 10 years at the company.
So I think we're all pretty talented at finding those vulnerabilities and weaknesses that we sort of perceive that probably nobody else really sees.
All right, so you were at Microsoft for a while.
Tell me about how you came up with the idea for MindTouch.
Aaron Fulkerson (14:44.750)
Sure.
When we were doing research, what we were doing was distributed systems research.
It's really Internet of things, machine to machine.
That's what we were doing while we were in that research group.
Right.
We didn't call it that back then, it was distributed systems research, but it's IoT is really what it was.
So my responsibility was to package up the information that we were developing inside that group in a way that we can matriculate it into product team.
And I was really passionate about this because I wanted, as I always have, I want to be of service to people.
Right.
That's what I care about, is helping others.
And we were doing some really exciting things.
And I wanted to get this into the hands of product teams that would inform the products they ship so that we could have an impact across millions of users that are Microsoft customers.
The challenge I faced was there weren't any useful technologies for self service like getting self service, transfer of information.
You know, it's one thing to do talks at Microsoft Research that's not very scalable.
Microsoft at the time, I don't even know how many heads there were in early 2000, but a lot more than we were going to talk to.
So I went around to first place I went to was the SharePoint team and that wasn't well suited for self service.
And then I went to the Office team and they were working on OneNote.
And that's not even intended for self service, but that was the team that I kind of went deep with.
I'm like, no, no, this doesn't make any sense.
And then I talked to some other Microsoft research groups that were doing kind of overlapping, but nobody was really working on solving this problem of TLDR too long.
Didn't read and in particular not invented here.
So my intention was born from this idea that Steve and I had was how do we turn a newbie into a ninja in the shortest time possible?
With that in mind, we decided that we wanted to work together.
So we started an open source project and we started writing code on the very first version of Mind Touch.
Omer (16:50.860)
Were you, you guys were still at Microsoft when you were doing this?
Were you kind of moonlighting?
Aaron Fulkerson (16:55.500)
No, no, we left.
We left the company.
I wanted to be interacting with customers rather than researchers.
So I was the first to leave.
And Steve Was like, well, if you're leaving, I'm leaving.
And I didn't really think he was serious, but sure enough, he did.
And then over the next year or so we kept talking about, well, this is a really interesting problem we should solve.
And we started talking about different approaches to solving it and then decided, well, let's just, let's just go ahead and make a run at this.
And built an open source project that we shipped in late 2006.
So it was near the end of 2006, and then by the end of 2007 there's four or five of us working on it.
And by the end of 2007 we'd come up with some ideas of, well, how would we commercialize this?
And we'd shipped a couple of versions and this was now Thanksgiving 2007.
So almost the end of the year.
And I took a long weekend with my family to the mountains and came back and I was planning on telling Steve that, you know, I think I'm going to go take the job at Google.
And Steve had put our packages up on Sourceforge.
This was before GitHub.
So Sourceforge was the community for open source projects at the time.
And it's 300,000 open source projects up there.
And I came back to the office and Steve was like, well, hey, guess how many, guess how many downloads we've done?
Like, I don't know how many.
And he's like, 2000.
I was like, wow, 2000 downloads.
It's near the end of the year.
We've done like almost 2000.
We've done over 2000 downloads this year.
That's really cool.
He's like, no, we did 2,000 yesterday.
Omer (18:34.720)
Wow.
Aaron Fulkerson (18:35.520)
So turns out the project was wildly popular.
In fact, of those 300,000 projects ranked on Sourceforge, where you distribute your source code, they'd rank them too.
And mindtouch was the.
that time it was in the top 10.
It was maybe number five, fifth most popular project on Sourceforge.
Omer (18:56.570)
Why did you start out as a open source project?
Were you guys thinking of building a business at that point?
Aaron Fulkerson (19:04.170)
Yeah, we were.
We were thinking about building a business and there's a couple of forces pushing on us.
One, we genuinely believed perhaps at a religious level in open source and thought that this was something that we liked and we believed in that the source code should be made open to anybody.
Then from a business perspective, we had toyed with this idea of, well, look, if we put the source code out there, then it'll create disruptive distribution.
Economics that will allow us to go back in and sell a commercial offering of some sort.
And we tossed around ideas from tin wrapping it, where we put it as a hardware appliance, to selling a support subscription to, okay, well we'll give away the open source and employ an open core model, which is what, it wasn't called open core back then, but which is what we eventually settled on was okay, we're going to give away the preponderance of the code.
Anybody can go download it it, and then there's going to be commercial connectors and doodads that, that connect to it, that will sell as part of an annual subscription that's included with support.
Omer (20:11.930)
Okay, cool.
Okay, so you guys launched in 2004.
How long was it before you were able to figure out how to commercialize it and get your first paying customer?
Aaron Fulkerson (20:30.320)
Yeah, I think we created a company in 2004, but we didn't yet know what we were doing.
We just had a great domain name, mindtouch.com so we hadn't even conceived yet of exactly what we were doing.
So the company, the first lines of code were written sometime in 2005.
The first product launch was at the Open Source conference in Portland in 2006.
And then 2007, November was when we started selling something.
And what we sold was support subscription.
And then 2008, we sold support subscriptions on our on premise.
People would download it, install it on premise, then we would optionally take their contact information.
They could provide it if they liked.
And then I would hit them with emails to talk to us about purchasing a support subscription.
Oh wait, we did.
It was just shy of a million dollars in cash receipts with an average sale price of $3,500.
So we're like, woohoo.
And then 2009, we'd grown the company and we were burning money and we did about 2.3, 2.5 in cash receipts with an average sale price of $4,500.
But we were so most people will be like, oh my God, you more than doubled your revenue and, and wow, you must have been crushing it.
We really weren't.
We were actually driving off of a cliff.
What we'd focused on were, I mean, at the time it was really vanity metrics.
I mean, sure, it was distribution and MindTouch had a very massive install base.
I mean, there's still our open source product, which we haven't shifted an update to since January of 2010, is a huge install base.
But in 0809 it was even bigger.
There's the thing that we were focused on was the distribution and we were burning money and we didn't have money to burn.
It was 08, 09, you couldn't fundraise and the people that were using us was people who would install it on premise for like an intranet.
So it was basically competitive with Dropbox, Box, SharePoint, 300 other vendors in this indefensible business of, you know, collaboration.
So in end of 09 was this, hey, we've got to rethink our entire business because our current go to market is failing us.
We don't have a defensible business, we've only got a couple of months of cash.
And it was like, okay, we have to figure out something that we can be best in the world at and actually defend.
And it's certainly not on premise software, it has to be cloud and it's certainly not IT person tools for internal collaboration because you know, you've got hundreds of vendors out there with hundreds of millions or billions of dollars that are going after that market and we're self funded and there's no way we can do that.
Omer (23:21.580)
So between 2004 when you registered the business and 2008 when you, you generated around I think what, $900,000 in revenue those first few years.
Was there any money coming in?
Aaron Fulkerson (23:42.800)
No, no, we, it was, it was more of a project and we were self funding a small team.
You know, we asked friends and family to assist us and they made big bets on us.
Omer (23:55.680)
So what kept you going for that long?
You know, I think these days maybe somebody would be, well these days maybe somebody would launch and like a week later they'll be like time to pivot.
Right?
But what kept you going for those, those three or four years when you didn't have any money coming in?
Aaron Fulkerson (24:14.830)
Those, those were actually the easy years, right?
The reason why they were the easy years or I mean the, those weren't the hardest years, I'll put it that way.
The reason why was so we shipped in 06, right?
So we had this from 06 to 07.
It's like, all right, we were focused on the product and taking feedback from end users and making the product better.
So there's a lot of fulfillment in that.
Right.
Then from 07 to 09 we were seeing this massive distribution install base and this huge community blooming around us where they were building applications and deployments.
So that was like very fulfilling and rewarding, right?
Because we've got this incredible user adoption.
Literally millions of people are using our software.
It was exciting.
The hard time was end of 2009 through 2011.
And the reason why that was the hard time was we had to realize that we were not going to succeed, that we were going to fail.
And we had to come up with a business model which would work.
Which was okay, one, we're going to host this in the cloud and we're going to focus exclusively on the use case of helping companies to turn self service support into a customer engagement channel.
Right.
That you can create connection and understanding with your users while turning them into product experts.
Omer (25:41.940)
But wait, you just made $2.3 million in 2009 and I assume revenue was still coming in in 2010 and 11.
So what was it that was raising these alarm bells for you and telling you that this business was going to fail?
Aaron Fulkerson (26:00.490)
Well, SharePoint came out with their 2010 offering which was a complete copy of our marketing around rapid application development.
But the main thing wasn't the market forces which got particularly hot where all these guys have hundreds of millions or billions of dollars in their bank to go after this general purpose space.
The biggest big alarm bell was yes, we sold 2.3 2.5 million in 09 in cash receipts on to our customers, right.
In annual recurring revenue.
But we were burning money and we didn't have any money to burn.
So we had to quickly figure out hey, we got to get breakeven fast.
And if we go out and try to fundraise for our first time, we are thinking was drive the distribution, go Fundraise.
That was 2008.
Well guess what?
There wasn't a single check written from 2008 to Q4.
Of Q4, 2009 was the first time that a venture capitalist wrote a check to a net new company.
It was a year and it was, it was a year and three quarters of nuclear winter.
So you couldn't raise money.
Omer (27:03.940)
You couldn't have picked a worse time to go and look for money, I guess.
Aaron Fulkerson (27:07.260)
No, no, exactly.
I mean I even, I even.
There was nobody writing checks, right?
So I mean literally, I mean, I'm not saying figuratively.
If you look at the data, there was not a single check written from 2008 through the end.
It was like at the end of 09 they started writing net new checks.
By then our unit economics, our business performance, it was a mess, man.
We had so much competition at the end of 09, sure we more than doubled our revenue, but we're burning money.
Our unit economics look like crap.
Our customer retention looked like crap, Our churn looked like crap.
Because it wasn't a defensible business and it wasn't sticky.
So the product wasn't sticky for the use case that we were applying it for.
So it was like, okay, we're restarting.
Some people could call it a pivot if you liked, but it was more of a restart.
And that was January 2010.
I put together a slide deck, went out to our best customers at the time.
It was Exact Target, which was acquired by Salesforce, PayPal, Intuit, Mozilla, a handful of software companies.
And they were using us for what?
We decided, hey, we're going to exclusively focus on this.
We're not going to do anything else, and we're going to deliver it in the cloud.
I presented, hey, we've got a cloud product we're going to be launching at the end of 2010.
If you guys are excited about it, we want to bring you on to this new product.
And I presented it to these companies and not only were they excited about it, most of them had already built big parts of it on our open source.
So they were really excited about having it delivered in a cloud deployment and have our roadmaps aligned so that we were building the product for them instead of them doing it on open source.
Omer (28:39.700)
Because before that, didn't you guys also have a hardware device that you were trying to sell?
Aaron Fulkerson (28:44.660)
Oh, we did, we did in 07.
Hardware device that we called 10 wrapped.
So we had free open source and then we had this appliance that you could buy and we sold in 07.
We probably sold, I don't know, like a dozen of them.
So, but I mean, that was like.
We realized as soon as we launched that idea and we tooled the first one, we're like, there's no way this is going to work.
But the beautiful thing about that hardware was we'd invested in this whole backup and update process and we were thinking in terms of appliances.
So back in 0607, when VMware came out with their ESX server, we'd already had a prepackaged appliance that was a virtual appliance, and that accounted for half of our distribution and a huge part of our popularity.
So the ESX server, VMware's product for like this IT server that you'd plop into an environment and you'd have a marketplace of apps.
MindTouch, because we'd invested so heavily in the user experience, was one of five of the appliances featured in it.
So that was one of the key things that just launched our distribution.
But, you know, going Back to what was the hard years was it was 2010 going through that transition from okay, we're an on premise software company that's delivering open source software to okay, we're now to IT buyers, to okay, we're a cloud software company exclusively focusing on this one business use case that is a business buyer.
Well, most of the mind touchers that were with us at that time really didn't understand this transition or all they knew is that we doubled our revenues the year before.
And yeah, sure, times are hard.
We don't have a lot of money, but we need to double down on this business, which if we had, we would have gone out of business.
And furthermore, we didn't have much cash, we had to cut back our expenses, we'd overhired and we had to actually slash our headcount by 40%.
It was really tough.
That was the worst time 2010, and the first half of 2011 was just the hardest time.
Omer (30:54.730)
So it sounds like you've had this rollercoaster ride from 2004.
You had the ups and downs and where, you know, the good times and the bad times.
Was there a moment where you just felt like you just wanted to give up?
Aaron Fulkerson (31:10.250)
Yeah, I mean, absolutely.
There's, I think everybody faces that.
There's, there's plenty of.
I would have been a stark raving madman had I not.
The key things that especially 2010, 2011, the easy thing to do would have been to give up for sure.
And it would have been a much easier thing to do.
However, the thing that sustained me was it's really my loyalty and friendship to the mind touchers around me.
It always has been.
In particular Steve, but the rest of the team as well.
I couldn't, I couldn't do it.
I just, I would have felt so bad to have abandoned them.
Omer (31:46.060)
You know, you've seen significantly reduced headcount.
You're going through this big transformation and I can understand now what you mean by restart as opposed to a pivot, because you really, you were really going back to the drawing board and sort of rebuilding this business from the ground up.
Aaron Fulkerson (32:04.500)
Different, different buyers, different messaging.
The benefit that we did have was we had our legacy business.
So we let our customers know we were very upfront with them all along the way that we would be deprecating that, that product.
So from 2010 through 2013 though, that accounted that legacy business accounted for $6.2 million in revenue, in dollars that we funded the company with because we had no more money to pull on, we had no more favors to Call in.
So from 2011, we've been.
We hit break even and we grew in 2011, 2010, we were flat.
I think we grew by like a couple hundred thousand dollars over 2009, but it was effectively flat in 2010.
And then we wound down that legacy business and launched a new one.
And I can tell you firsthand, having the distraction of a legacy business makes launching another business much, much harder.
If we'd had capital resources, we would have just jettisoned that business altogether and not even messed around with it.
But we didn't.
We had to rely on it.
And in fact, that $6.2 million wasn't enough to get us through the linears.
The other thing we did was we stood up a small services team that was selling services on that legacy business.
Custom work just to fund the headcount and the infrastructure for the new product we were launching.
Omer (33:33.130)
Wow.
So when did things start to turn around?
Have you completely shut down the legacy business now?
Aaron Fulkerson (33:39.980)
Oh, yeah.
That's been gone since 2013.
All of our businesses and our services arm was dissolved and reabsorbed into the engineering team.
As of 2012, it seemed like we were going to thread the needle in 2011.
That was when I was like, holy, we might make it through this.
And 2011, sure enough, was, okay, great.
We broke even.
We're sitting there going like, hey, I've got one month of cash in the the bank.
Okay, I've got two months of cash in the bank, okay?
It's recurring revenue, it's stable.
We've got three months of cash in the bank, right?
And we're breaking even.
So 2011 was like, okay, I think we did it right.
So 2010 through, it took us about a year and a half to get into a stable place.
And then 2012, we started to take off again.
So we grew the new business over three years to over 10 million in annual recurring revenue.
So it took off like a rocket.
Wow.
In fact, look at like the Bessemer Venture Partners or Pacific crest analysis of SaaS vendors.
Software as a service vendors, they break down what the key performance indicators are for software as a service businesses.
This is anything from retention to churn to customer acquisition costs to growth gross margins.
MindTouch in 2014 outperformed the highest performing software as a service companies by one to two standard deviations across all of the SaaS metrics.
Omer (35:16.310)
What do you think was behind that?
What were you guys doing that helped you stand out like that?
Aaron Fulkerson (35:23.590)
Well, Steve and I sat down in 2010 when we knew that we were one step away from falling off a cliff and killing the company.
And we sat down over a beer at Carl Strauss, where we hired that QA manager from.
He was just a tester back then.
And we said.
And it was Steve who did this.
He said, you know, we should set some principles that we live by, because we're probably going to fail in turning this company around.
But what are the things that if we do fail, which, again, we probably will.
He's German.
He's pretty negative.
At least we could look back and go, well, at least we kept true to these principles.
And here's what those three principles were.
Number one, we were determined to build a product and deliver it to our customers.
One that our customers loved so much that they'd recommend to other people.
That was number one.
Number two, we wanted to create a work environment that attracted good, smart people who wanted to work hard, doing great things.
Number three, no douchebags.
Omer (36:51.230)
That's my favorite.
Aaron Fulkerson (36:54.750)
So the reality was these principles that we put forward, which we.
We still hold to today, these were principles that we thought would make.
Make us proud when we failed, that we could look back and say, well, at least we kept to those three principles.
And the reality of it was, it really, truly was, I believe this firmly, those three principles that turned us into a successful company.
Omer (37:26.519)
I think there's a really powerful lesson there that you guys were almost like, we're going to fail, so let's establish those principles and do things on our terms so we can look back and at least feel good about what we did, even if we still end up going over the cliff.
And I wonder if that was almost the point where it just freed you to.
I don't know, it just kind of gave you the license to go out there and do stuff maybe that you guys hadn't been doing before.
And it's clear that from some of the data that you're sharing that that's exactly what happened.
Um, and.
And it's.
I think there's also a similarity there where I've heard about people sometimes saying, I. I kind of look back at those years and felt that I had a lot of stress and a lot of pressure to kind of grow this business.
And I wish I had just spent more of that time enjoying myself as well.
Right.
And I think that's basically what you guys were doing by developing these principles was kind of establishing an environment where you felt good about what you were doing.
Aaron Fulkerson (38:43.960)
Yeah, I think so.
I think that that's accurate.
And the other thing was that, man, I Mean, it was just such a tough time.
I think back about that time in my life, and it was a really, really tough time.
I know.
I'm so grateful.
My wife was just so generous with me to help me get through that period, you know?
But, yeah, I think you're spot on about that.
In the early days of MindTouch, I know that you mentioned Andrew's interview with me.
In the early days of MindTouch, there were times in which we would make a hiring decision because we felt like, hey, this person, he seems like kind of a douchebag, but we think he can make us successful, so let's bring him on anyway.
And thankfully, ever since we set forward those principles, we never made that mistake.
And the other thing is that it makes the work environment so much more pleasant.
And since we're really strong product guys, we really care about the product.
That's something that makes us, in the shitty times, at least we can go, hey, at least the product we're really proud of.
So, yeah, I think you're right.
Omer (39:49.100)
All right, let's move on to the lightning round.
I'm going to ask you a series of questions and I'd like to answer them as quickly as you can.
You ready?
Aaron Fulkerson (39:57.180)
Yes.
All right.
Omer (39:58.750)
What's the best piece of business advice that you ever received?
Aaron Fulkerson (40:02.430)
I don't know if I received this, but what I.
What I would give for business advice is find a group of people that you can get advice from that you can bounce ideas off of that you can be around and talk business with.
It's.
It's.
I just feel like people.
People do not do this enough.
And.
And it's one of the things that if you look at successful people who've really achieved great things consistently, every single time, they've got a broader group of individuals that they're connecting with and being fearless and vulnerable with.
Right.
I think a lot of people don't do this because it means that they're vulnerable and they're sharing their insecurities or sharing their weaknesses, and you got to do that.
It makes a big difference.
Yeah.
Omer (40:50.130)
What book would you recommend to our audience and why?
Aaron Fulkerson (40:53.010)
Gosh, I know that there's some that I've read this year that were really, really great.
I really.
For, like, if you're a technology person, if your background's engineering, go read Simon Sinek's Start With Y, I think, is what it's called.
What's it called?
Omer.
You've read that, haven't you?
Omer (41:08.050)
Yeah, yeah, I think it's.
I think it starts.
Start with Y. I'll put a link in the show notes.
Aaron Fulkerson (41:13.250)
But like, generally that's a good one for engineering people, for people who are on the front of the house.
I think of things in business in terms of back of the house.
In front of the house.
Just because I ran restaurants in my 20s, when I was backpacking, I worked in restaurants a lot.
So, you know, if you're back of the house, engineer type, read Simon Sinek.
Start with why, if you're front of the house, Challenger Sale.
It's exactly how I've always sold.
I just didn't know that there was this awesome book out there until last year.
Challenger Sales.
Sales.
A great book.
If you're front of the house, generally speaking, and this is applicable as a human being or an entrepreneur.
Be Here Now, a book that I've always recommended.
It's pretty out there.
It's a great book.
Be Here Now.
Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind, Anything by Alan Watts.
Huge fan of.
There you go.
There's a bunch of books.
Omer (42:06.830)
I discovered Alan Watts a couple of years ago and I love watching his videos on.
Well, I guess they're not his videos, but videos on YouTube of Alan Watts.
Aaron Fulkerson (42:15.730)
He's fantastic, man.
The audible versions of a lot of his books are.
They're his lectures.
His.
The books.
His books are his lectures.
And the audible versions are actually him lecturing.
He's an incredible speaker.
What is it?
This is it or you're it?
I forget which.
I always get the name of the title of the book.
That's like just an incredible book, man.
Everybody should read that book.
When I was 15, I read Buddha, Dharma and Forever, since I've been a Buddhist.
And although Alan Watts was a priest and I think he went through several different types of religions that he was a clergy of.
The guy's phenomenal.
I couldn't recommend him enough.
Omer (42:59.950)
What is one attribute or characteristic in your mind of a successful entrepreneur?
Aaron Fulkerson (43:07.150)
Grit, number one, Hands down, grit.
In fact, it's one of the things that we look for at hiring at MindTouch.
Our core values is, number one, grit.
And then there's beginner's mind and some other ones that are surprising to most people.
But grit is the most important one.
In fact, I'll add to my book list, Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World.
He was probably a psychopath, but the thing about the book is.
Actually, I don't think that he was a psychopath.
It was just the times.
But the thing about him was the guy was a slave.
And he didn't really begin his, quote, career until his 30s.
And he wasn't actually conquering the world and leading an empire until, like, his 40s.
The guy was a slave for, like, 10 or 15 years of his life.
And talk about grit.
Oh, my God.
Read that book.
It's a great book.
Genghis Khan in the Making of the Modern World.
Omer (44:03.340)
What's your favorite personal productivity tool or habit?
Aaron Fulkerson (44:07.420)
Exercise.
I did not.
I mean, I was always active, right?
Like camping, hiking, you know, But I was not, like, conscientiously active and doing exercise until I read.
This is another great book.
Spark and the Revolutionary New Science of Exercise and the Mind.
Excellent book.
It just talks about how exercise changes your brain chemistry, rewires your brain.
So I started in my late 20s, I think.
Yeah, late 20s.
Early 30s.
Yeah, early 30s.
And that's just had a profound impact.
Get on a regular exercise regimen.
It is critical to entrepreneurs.
It's critical to everybody.
But in entrepreneurs in particular, if you want to be a high performer, you must exercise.
You must find the time.
It's your time.
Take that time.
It has a profound impact on your productivity.
Omer (45:01.450)
What's a business idea that you'd love to pursue if you had the extra time?
Aaron Fulkerson (45:07.530)
I think that I love James Altucher.
James Altucher is such a great guy.
I love his writing.
And I think also Munger, Charlie Munger, he also talks about this too, where you're supposed to sell yourself more time that you could apply to some endeavor where you basically allocate some percent, 10% of your time to some endeavor that you consistently do.
Consistently do.
If I.
A business idea.
I don't know if this is a business idea.
I guess it is.
I would like to.
To sell myself 10% of my time to really hone writing and to develop that muscle.
It's a muscle like anything.
And if I were doing it more actively, I think anybody who does that, you don't even have to be good at it.
You just keep at it.
Keep at it, keep at it.
It's not difficult to develop a annuity revenue stream from doing stuff like that.
And, yeah, that's what I do.
Omer (46:08.590)
Yeah.
Cool.
What's an interesting or fun fact about you that most people don't know?
Aaron Fulkerson (46:14.270)
I've been homeless before.
Omer (46:16.510)
Wow.
Aaron Fulkerson (46:17.710)
When.
Omer (46:17.990)
When was that?
Aaron Fulkerson (46:19.550)
That was my 20s.
You know, there was several times in my 20s.
Yeah, I was back, I was hitchhiking, backpacking, and yeah, there's big periods where I didn't actually have a home or a place that I could actually call My own home.
Yeah.
I guess that's a fun fact.
Omer (46:38.630)
That is.
Well, I'm not sure if it's fun, but it's.
It's a fact.
What is one of your most important passions outside of your work?
Aaron Fulkerson (46:48.230)
Oh, dude, my kids.
Hands down, kids.
Love my kids.
6 and 9 years old.
Roosevelt Ashby.
Oh, man, they're amazing.
Yeah.
Family, Kids.
Family, kids.
And my wife and I have been together.
This is another fun fact.
I have very little filter when I talk, so people have a tendency of misinterpreting my personality.
But my wife and I have been together.
This thing.
I'm like, wild, crazy, but I'm actually pretty prudish and conservative.
Not politically, but personally.
So my wife and I have been together for 19 years as of September 21st.
Omer (47:22.080)
Wow.
Aaron Fulkerson (47:22.800)
21.
Have been together ever since.
And just.
I'm just passionately in love with that person.
Omer (47:28.370)
Wow, that's amazing.
So the big 2o is coming up next year.
That's amazing.
Aaron Fulkerson (47:31.810)
Yeah.
So we.
We've been married.
It will be married 17 in June, but we've been together 19 and since September.
So next year it'll be.
I think next year we will have been together for half my life.
Wow.
Yeah.
Omer (47:47.330)
All right, Aaron, it's been a pleasure, and I really appreciate you making the time.
Um, and for folks who are listening, probably, you know, we.
We try to record this once before, and we had some sound issues.
So I. I really appreciate you making the time to come back and share your experiences and insights.
Uh, it's a great story with what you've done with Mind Touch, and it sounds like you guys have still got a long way to go with what you're doing.
Aaron Fulkerson (48:18.740)
I feel the best.
Thank you so much.
Omer.
Thank you for your time and to your audience.
You know, feel free to reach out to me if you guys.
If I can be helpful in any way.
And thanks, guys, now.
Omer (48:28.690)
Yeah, I thank you for reminding me by that.
So, folks, can go to.
If you want to find out more, you can go to mindtouch.com and what is the best way for them to get in touch with you?
Aaron Fulkerson (48:38.450)
I guess AaronInTouch.com is the easiest way, but that just buries me in the email.
You could do that.
You could do that.
I mean, just hit me on Twitter is probably the easiest way that you'll get a response.
And then we can take it into a more private channel.
And on Twitter, it's R O E B O T. Robot.
I'm Aaron Rowe Fulkerson.
So I'm Robot on Twitter.
Omer (48:57.850)
Sweet.
Aaron, Thanks a lot.
I wish you all the best, man.
Aaron Fulkerson (49:00.610)
Thank you, Amar.
Have a great day.
Omer (49:01.930)
You too.
Bye.
