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.
We've got another great episode lined up for you today.
This week's guest is a developer turned entrepreneur who quit his corporate job to bootstrap his startup and he has never looked back.
Today's guest is the founder of Sendowl, a platform that makes it easy to sell digital products online.
He founded the company as a side project in 2011 while he was still working as a Ruby on Rails freelancer and within two years was able to start working on it full time.
He spent less than $50 to start this business and has bootstrapped it from day one.
Today, Sendowl has four full time employees and is profitable.
He has a great story and I'm looking forward to sharing that with you.
So today I'd like to welcome George Palmer.
George, welcome to the show.
George Palmer (01:27.550)
Thank you, Omer.
Very humbled to be here.
Omer (01:31.070)
So George is joining us from London today, my former hometown.
And even George was a little bit confused about where my accent was from.
So that shows how after 10 years in the Seattle area, I'm really starting to lose it.
Now.
Let's start by talking about what drives you.
I often ask my guests for a success quote or just to tell me what gets them out of bed every morning.
So what is it for you?
Is there a quote that resonates with you?
Or if not, then what gets you out of bed?
George Palmer (02:15.330)
Yeah, that's a really good question.
That was quite an evil question to start with.
I mean, I do have a quote.
What gets me out of bed in the morning is a great question.
I'll tell you.
I'll answer those separately.
One of my favorite quotes of all time is by Woody Allen.
And it's success is 80% showing up.
And I love that because with the sort of development of the Internet, loads of people talk about how the rules of business have changed and you don't need to charge people, you just need to get really, really big, like Facebook and then you'd be worth loads of money.
You don't have to worry.
And that's true.
There are some companies that will do that, but there's very few companies that will reach that point.
And so I really love this quote because it just reminds me that actually the fundamental rules of business haven't changed.
You can either provide a service or you can buy something.
For $1 and sell it for $2.
Make a mark up on that.
And that's basically it.
That's been the same for thousands of years.
So I love this quote.
It just sort of reminds me that actually if you just turn up and keep doing what you're doing and keep your customers happy and keep going, then you're doing a good job.
So that's really my success quote.
To answer your other question, what gets me up in the morning?
You know, for the first few years on Sendow, I was doing the customer support because it was just me.
And the biggest satisfaction I got in these first few years was when we got a new customer and they were just so happy finding Sendow.
They're like, oh, I used to use a competitor and it was just so slow.
And it was slow and reliable.
Or I just really love your design.
Or I had one guy within a few months of starting and he said, absolutely love send out, tell me your address, I'm gonna mail you a crate of beer.
I was like, what?
I was like, no, that's.
Honestly, it's fine, you know, just pay your monthly fee.
And he's like, no, no, I really want to send you the beer.
And he's like, you know, I know what it's like when you start up and you know, it's hard going and you know you haven't got much money and there's a small team.
And I was like, well, firstly it's just me at this point and secondly, we're in the uk so you probably couldn't mail us the beer anyway.
And so you PayPal me $50 like straight back.
So I promised myself when I got the first employees, I would use that money and take us out.
So when we got person number two in the door, that's exactly what we did.
Omer (05:08.510)
Now, you know, your background is very similar, I think, to a lot of people who'd be listening to this show.
You started your career as a software developer.
I know you were at IBM for a couple of years and you spent some time doing Java development and then eventually switched over to becoming a Rails developer.
Now I think a lot of people maybe are in that situation where they're either in a, a full time job or maybe they're freelancing and kind of have a project on, you know, there's a side project maybe they're trying to get off the ground.
How did Send Owl come about for you?
Because this was something that you started as well when you were still freelancing, right?
George Palmer (05:57.240)
Yeah, that's right.
So I was at a client site and they were asking about Digital Delivery.
And I said, I'll look that up for you, do a bit of research.
And I was just appalled with the quality of solutions that were out there.
I was like, you know what?
I could do better than this.
So that was how I got to it.
And then I sort of used that one day a week I had and used evenings and weekends and wherever I could find time to get the first version out.
I took about three or four months, outsourced the design.
It just kept it as minimal as possible.
And the first version of Sendowl, it wasn't even called Sendowl then it was called Digital Delivery App, which is a crap name.
And then iPhones came out.
So then this concept of an app really confused people because I was like, wait, it's not on the iPhone?
And I was like, oh God.
So yeah, back then, I mean, there wasn't even a shopping cart.
All you could do is have a buy button on your site.
Someone clicked it and then they got a file delivered to them.
Automatically they clicked it.
So it was really minimal.
Omer (07:04.010)
So what were you using for the payment backend at the time?
Because I assume it wasn't something like Stripe or anything like that around at the time.
George Palmer (07:11.570)
Right?
Yeah, so Stripe wasn't around.
So it's just PayPal back then.
And we did it subsequently.
The next year we added a few that we've really sort of since removed.
There's one called Sage Pay, which was a UK one, so called authorize.net, which we still do support, which is.
And they're more like they let you plug your existing merchant account into the Internet.
So sort of like half of Stripe, if that makes sense.
Omer (07:35.630)
Yeah.
George Palmer (07:36.270)
So, yeah, so Stripe wasn't around, it was just PayPal.
And that's what everyone was using to sell in those days.
So that was fine.
And then, yeah, I got this, I got this first version out on the Internet and then I was like, crap, how am I gonna get any customers?
Omer (07:50.270)
Okay, so you've got the product out there and did you.
Had you given any thought to marketing?
George Palmer (07:55.250)
So it had all been focused on the product.
But what I did do is when I originally came up with the idea, I put £100 into AdWords and I created a landing page for this new app called Digital Delivery App.
And you could click the sign up button, but it didn't actually, there was nothing there.
All it did was record the sign up and say, oh, leave your email here and I'll get In touch when we're live.
And what that enabled me to do was to test the click through rate.
And I think it was about one and a half percent.
So I knew from this pretty crappy design that I'd knocked up on a free website that one and a half percent of people were actually interested in the service.
Like interested enough to try it out.
Omer (08:38.700)
One and a half percent of people who arrived at the landing page, not.
George Palmer (08:43.180)
Yes, one, yeah.
Arrived at the landing page and clicked that.
So it was just like, you know, click here to sign up and it said like nine from nine dollars a month.
So I knew they were willing to pay when they click that button.
Okay.
And it was just enough for me to validate that I was going to spend three or four months building this because, you know, you could be onto a business idea and there's no, unless you test the demands, you know, you're really stabbing in the dark.
But I was fairly convinced there was demand because there was four or five existing players out there.
So it wasn't, that wasn't a major issue, but I still wanted to test it myself.
Omer (09:17.860)
Did that put you off knowing that there were already four or five players in the market with probably customers and revenue and you were just starting out?
Did that put you off at any point?
George Palmer (09:31.940)
It didn't.
Because, you know, I'm a real fan of good design and I'll talk about good design a little bit later because what I consider good design is quite different from what other people consider good design.
People get caught up in the aesthetics and how it looks, whereas I think the function is much more important.
So I could see these sites and I was like, they're not doing a good job.
I mean, name drop.
But one of them was using a Flash interface and you can't get flash on your iPhone.
So just like they're just so old school in their thinking and the design and the way the copy's written.
And you know, it did, on one hand it's concerning its competitors, on the other hand it's great because, you know, it's a proven market.
What you obviously don't know is you don't know their margins, you don't know how fast they're growing, you don't know how many customers they've got.
So it didn't really concern me that much, to be honest with you, because I thought I could do a better job.
And I didn't really think about it that much either.
I was just, you know, at that point just trying out ideas, trying to find something I Could get a little bit of traction and then sort of devote myself to that.
Omer (10:48.010)
Okay, so the product is launched.
You don't have any customers, so you now start thinking about how to.
How did you get your first customer?
George Palmer (10:57.530)
How did I get my first customer?
So, yes, I kind of launched.
And, you know, you sort of.
When you launch one of these, and I'm sure this will sound familiar to many of your listeners, is you sort of press the button, you're there, you're live.
You're like, oh, my God.
I've worked all the hours that God can send the last two hours, and nothing.
Tumbleweed, what's going on?
I build it and I come, right?
You know, that's what happens.
So kind of a week went by, and I had, like, literally a few visitors from probably one of which was my mum, one of which would have been my brother.
You know, I was like, okay, right.
You know, how hard can it be to find the first few customers?
So what I came up with is I searched Twitter for my competitors every morning, and I looked for people that moaned about them during the last 24 hours.
And then I'd tweet them and say, hey, look, we're new, but you might like to check us out.
And I did this every day for a month, and I think I was probably averaging one or two tweets a day.
And the end of that month, I got two customers, and one was paying on the $9 plan, and one was on the $15 plan.
And the way that it works is that you get the first 30 days free.
So the next month, I got my first $9 come through via PayPal.
And I remember they really fondly, because I was like, okay, this is a goer.
You know, this.
Somebody's paid for that.
One person has paid for that.
All I need to do now is find a loan, more people that are willing to pay for it.
Omer (12:40.650)
I think there's something that.
I think if anybody hasn't been through this experience, it's.
It's maybe hard to explain, but there's something amazing about when you create something yourself and somebody that you've never met before comes and pays you money for it, Even if it's $9, it feels like so much more, doesn't it?
George Palmer (13:03.050)
It's a beautiful feeling.
It really is.
Yeah.
It's really hard to describe it.
It's like all the effort I've done, all that time that I put in, all that thought, all that stress, somebody somewhere was like, you know, this is the best solution for me right now.
I'm gonna get up there, I'm gonna get behind these guys and sign up and, you know, run my business through them.
So, yeah, it's a great feeling.
And actually, funnily enough, I still have this.
I have a spreadsheet every month where I update the, you know, income and our outgoing and our profit.
I mean, we do have now an accountancy SAS that we use, but it gets confused with loads of things like VAT and tax and all that crap.
So I love these little spreadsheets.
It has a little graph.
And the first month I'll have to get up and have a look, but I think the outgoings was $19.95 for a linode for our server, and I think we'd pay like $20 for an SSL certificate, and that was it.
And then the second month, we had this nine, this 15 in.
So we're almost profitable.
We lost like $5.
And then by the third month, we're actually profitable.
And I was like, oh, my God, I'm more successful than Facebook right now.
I'm more profitable.
And it's only month three.
Omer (14:23.280)
So was that it?
Those were your only costs at the time, the hosting for the app and the SSL certificate?
George Palmer (14:33.160)
Yeah, I mean, I can actually get it up and have a quick look if you want to check out the exact numbers.
But it was very roughly that.
I always sort of say, I give this talk, but yeah, I mean, you don't really need anything to launch.
Oh, hang on.
I had $0.12 in Amazon costs as well.
So.
Yeah, and that was for what, some
Omer (14:57.200)
S3 type hosting or something?
George Palmer (14:58.680)
Yeah, it must have been the S3 hosting, and that jumped to a whopping $1.91.
Yeah, so, I mean, that was it.
It was just the SSL certificate, the hosting, and, you know, if I look now, we've got like 50 expenses getting out each month.
You know, we've got a load more things.
But yeah, to launch, you really only need a bit of service space.
And if you actually run behind the cloudflare Free plan, you can get the SSL certificate for free now.
So you don't even need to worry about that.
So it's even cheaper nowadays.
Omer (15:28.990)
Okay, so you've got those two customers, and you mentioned earlier that, okay, I just need to go and find more of these people.
So what did you do?
Did you keep sort of chipping away with Twitter every day, or did you start looking at other sort of channels to find customers?
What were you doing next?
George Palmer (15:53.150)
Yes, the downside of the Twitter was initially did it manually.
And if you typed like when you competitors names in, then it also brought up all the URLs that people have posted on Twitter that linked them.
So you'd have to sift through a lot of tweets to try and find one where somebody wasn't actually trying to sell something.
And if you search on Twitter for people selling stuff, there's just robots pumping out spam24.7.
So it was really difficult to find genuine.
So I wrote a sort of script that just about did it and it pulled out a few, you know, pulled out perhaps a short list of 10 or 15 each day and I could just check those quickly.
And that went well for about a month.
And then I can't remember what happened, to be honest.
Twitter changed their API or something happened and I just couldn't find them.
I couldn't reliably get to these people without spending an hour or so each day.
And at that point, you know, I was up to a few customers and they were all banging in support requests for extra features, all of which I knew we desperately needed.
So I kind of got caught in the, what I call a feature rat race, which is where you're, if you're entering an established marketplace, you're sort of trying to catch up with what your competitors offer in terms of features, especially in E commerce software.
The way that people buy E commerce software is you can have the best support, you can have the best design, they can love your brand, they can love your company, but if you haven't got the one feature that they need, then they're not going to use you because you're not used to them.
So we kind of got caught up in this feature rat race for our.
But we were actually growing and we're growing thanks to really that sort of first two customers.
I don't really know how we got from 2 to 10, but once we got to 10, we.
Oh, I do.
There were a few things we did.
We went around and posted on a few blogs of people reviewing the services, reviewing digital delivery services and posting the comments saying, hey, I've just launched this new thing and yeah, I don't really know.
After that we sort of got to about 10 customers and one of them was a guy in Sweden and he just told, he must have told everybody he met for a month.
Another five or 10 customers from this guy, all from Sweden.
Oh, like all his pocket in Sweden.
And then next month we got a guy in South Korea.
He did the same sort of pocket in South Korea as well.
So we had these sort of guys who obviously bring us a few customers in.
And then we happened.
This guy called Mark Morris found this.
He's a British guy and he runs a computer game company called Introversion.
And he just emailed in and said, hey, I'm just about to launch a computer game.
Just wanted to make sure that your site would be able to handle the load.
And I was like, yeah, fine, no problems.
You don't really say no in those cases.
And at that point we were running on a $120 linode, which I think might have been a 1 gigabyte slice.
And what I didn't really question Mark about, and to be fair, he didn't know himself, was how big this launch was going to be.
And I can actually talk about the numbers because Mark's very publicly talked about them, otherwise I wouldn't be able to.
But they took about $18 million in the sort of month and the few months after this launch.
Wow.
They just got a hell of a lot of publicity.
And it's a great.
I mean, I'm not a computer gamer, but the premise behind the game is you sort of build a prison and manage it.
It's a bit like theme park for prisons.
And the videos, they just did a really funny video.
It was very British, dry in its humor, and it obviously just catches people's imagination.
And this thing basically pretty much brought.
It didn't quite go offline, but it brought us over very close to a standstill.
And they were running around panicking because they had sort of created, I don't know, a couple of thousand license keys and they needed more like tens and tens of thousands.
And we had a.
A performance bug in our code where technical and missed an index on a database lookup.
So every time it allocated a license key, it took longer and longer on each request.
And of course, they were throwing hundreds and thousands of customers every sort of hour.
And so this was like, you know, this was a bit of a nightmare for a few days.
And I was that time still working for other people, so I was like trying to jiggle the tea.
But it really turned into a great win for us because Mark, then, on the success of Prison Architect, went around and talked at a lot of conferences about indie game creation.
And he just excessively plugged us at every conference he went to.
How do you sell it?
Well, you go and set up Sendowl and use their buttons and you have it on your website.
Omer (21:03.880)
All right, so I want to kind of talk about this a little bit because first of all, just this experience of, I'm assuming this was a sort of a down, a software download for a PC or something, a PC game.
George Palmer (21:15.640)
Right?
Omer (21:16.360)
So, okay, so in many ways this is the
George Palmer (21:24.280)
big.
Omer (21:24.920)
It's the biggest nightmare and probably the best outcome at the same time for any new startup that you have somebody who will suddenly drive so much traffic to your site and you suddenly, you know, it's like a day and night from where you've been seeing like one or two visitors trickling into your site.
Now you're kind of, you know, you know, you're mainstream.
But the nightmare is that suddenly you realize, oh my God, my product's not ready.
You know, I haven't thought about scaling, I haven't dealt with all of these issues, and I'm finding all these performance bugs and, and everything else.
So, you know, that's, that's kind of a really difficult place to be.
But I'm intrigued what you said, you know, it didn't sound like, you know, he had a great experience with all the, the problems that you guys still had to deal with and just because you hadn't been prepared for it and you were so early in the stage of your business.
But then why, why, why did he feel happy enough to go out and tell everybody about you guys?
What, what was it that you did to turn him into a fan?
George Palmer (22:34.680)
Yeah, that's a great question.
And I'll have to ask him myself when I speak to him next.
But from memory, he certainly emailed me after saying why they'd gone with us.
So we had some good license keys at the time, which wasn't that common.
So if you sell a bit of software, as well as delivering the file, each time it will deliver a different license key.
So, you know, the first customer will get license one, the next customer gets license two.
And then when you install the software, they can call from our server to, from their server to our server to check the license is valid.
So there wasn't a lot of people offering that.
And the people that were either very enterprising, extremely expensive, or they were one of our more established competitors that took like five or six days to reply to support requests and had really high pricing and really poor performance.
So I think Mark could sort of see, you know, could see the future and he could see that our modern design and our great support and stuff was something that he wanted to work with.
And, you know, I think he thought we was a lot bigger than we were.
We certainly in the early days talked about we.
And in reality it was just me behind the scenes.
Although I guess you could have argued, you know, I was using someone for the design, so maybe it was a we, but, but I think.
Omer (23:55.780)
But at that point it really, apart from the designer, it was you.
And you were still working as a freelancer, so you still had client commitments.
You only had about a day, a week to work on this.
You had the features that you were still being asked to build into the product.
But now you've got to deal with support and suddenly you're hit with scaling challenges much earlier on than you expected.
George Palmer (24:24.140)
Happy days, eh?
Omer (24:27.500)
I know you don't disclose revenue, but the business is profitable and it's been profitable from day one.
As we talked about earlier months.
George Palmer (24:36.300)
Two months.
Omer (24:37.220)
Two.
And you've bootstrapped this all the way.
Did you ever consider taking any VC money?
I know you've had a number of offers along the way.
Did you ever think about that?
George Palmer (24:59.210)
Yeah, I mean we've had, you know, we had a few offers in the first few years and then the last 18 months we've had a lot of people get in touch.
If you take the VC money, right, you've got to go big or go bust.
They want you to spend that in two years and see that you're going to either get a return or forget it.
And for them, they're leveraging their risk.
They've got 20 companies like you, so as long as one goes huge, they're happy.
Whereas for you, you can spend five years of your life absolutely busting your gut and you walk out with nothing.
And the thought of that for me is just, no thanks, I'm not interested in that at all.
You know, I'm very low risk, as I said.
But yeah, going back to that door analogy, I'll take the decent wage and the cushy lifestyle and, you know, build from there.
Omer (25:48.750)
Yeah, I mean, you say that, but I think in some ways you did take the other door.
I mean, you did leave the comfort of, you know, a corporate job and a predictable salary to go and build your own business.
But you've done it in a way where you have managed the risks and built the business on your terms, which I think has been a really smart thing to do.
Tell me a little bit about what a typical day looks like for you.
What time do you wake up?
What do you do in a typical day or a week?
How do you plan your time?
That was like a five part question there.
George Palmer (26:36.440)
Yeah, well, I answer all the parts.
There's a test I've forgotten.
So my typical day.
So my alarm will go up at 7.
I'm pretty good at getting straight out of bed so I'll get out of bread, I'll grab some porridge and I'll be at my desk by 10 past quarter past and I will then work till about 11:30.
And during that time, you know, I'm very efficient with my email but I don't like to spend time there in the mornings.
That's my most productive time of day.
So I kind of use that to my advantage.
So I'll jump straight in.
You know, if you rewind.
Six months ago I was 90% of my job was still coding.
Now it's a very small part so I'll be straight into the code and working on whatever new feature was working on.
And then at 9 or 8:30 whenever Andrew starts, he comes on, we have a little catch up and that's just a couple of minutes stand up to discuss status of where we both are at.
So I'm just a developer and then I'll work straight through to like 11:30.
I will also check in that time the support queue for anything urgent because Paul who's in America comes online at 2.
But really that's my productive time.
So you know, I aim to be head down and getting stuff done.
Then at that point I head off to the gym.
So I'm really into my fitness and I'll talk about this a little bit more if we've got time but you know, I find exercise makes me so much more productive.
I find doing it in the middle of the day breaks my day.
So when I come back I've had, so I'll come back, I'll get back here about 1:30, have a shower and some lunch.
It'll be about two till I get going again.
So about two and a half hours off in the middle of the day.
And that just works extremely well for me because when I come back I'm refreshed.
Whereas if I sit here for like eight, nine hours I just find myself slumping and my energy levels dropping.
It just doesn't work that well for me.
So yeah, I'll come back, I'll talk to Paul or probably do a bit of work on a couple of tricky support issues that we might have going on.
I'll clear my emails, I use that especially the first hour after lunch.
I tend to like to get all the odds and ends out the way and then I'll get back on it about three working on whatever I'm working on when I finish, which will be anytime between five and seven, you know, six is probably an average.
I'm a big believer in, like, if you're in a great state of flow, then you don't want to break it unnecessarily.
But equally like, again, and this is long term thinking, like, you can only do long hours for very short amount of time and it catches up with you.
So, yeah, I don't really want to be working that much more than eight hours a day.
So I try and focus on high value creating tasks rather than spending time in the office, which is utter bull.
And I'm the same with all the people who employ the focus on output.
It's not on the number of hours that you work.
So, yeah, so that'll get me to that.
And then I'll either eat or be out for drinks with friends or sometimes after gymnastics class.
It really depends what I've got going on in the evenings.
Omer (30:07.640)
Okay, cool.
George Palmer (30:09.080)
And then I'll go to bed.
And I always, always get eight hours of sleep a night.
I don't always, always, but, you know, that's my target.
And the only time I really don't get that is if I've been out and had a big night out.
Omer (30:21.240)
Yeah, yeah, no.
I really like the way that you have built this business, found and hired people who are attracted to the kind of culture that you want to create.
And it's sort of working well for them as well in terms of letting them live the kind of lives that they want to live.
And I think that it's, I think too often we kind of get caught up and especially over here in the US and sort of the sort of the Silicon Valley kind of culture of working obsessively, you know, all the hours that you have and doing nothing else.
And the interesting thing is that the more entrepreneurs I talk to, I'm finding more and more people like you, more people who are, are willing to talk about this and who are creating more of a balance, who are looking at businesses for the long term and not just for, you know, something that they can do, you know, work on 100 hours a week for the next year and then have a quick exit and they're building real businesses and, and they're doing it in a way where they're having fulfilling lives as well.
And that's, that really is the best of both worlds.
I think.
So.
George Palmer (31:46.970)
Yeah.
Omer (31:47.410)
Hats off to you.
George Palmer (31:49.170)
Thanks, man.
Thanks.
Yeah, I mean, I just built, you know, the company that I wanted to work at.
And that's the great thing about starting your own company.
You know, you decide on the culture.
But I think something you just said that really hits the rear of it, you know, had this massive financial crisis the last seven, eight years, whatever it's been.
And you know, I'm just like, if everybody was a bootstrap company, there'd be such a tight web.
They've been on this crap, pissing about with Libor rates and fixing exchange rates and selling subprime mortgages to try and bolster profits.
None of that crap would be needed and you just got a strong revenue.
There's no concept of financial.
We didn't notice the recession.
And when Greece had problems, we had a few guys who were like, well, can't actually pay my monthly fee this month because my credit card won't let me buy anything.
I was like, oh, it's fine, have it free for a month.
It doesn't really, you know, I'm more than happy to extend that gratitude to you for, you know, something you can't control.
And, you know, we're not going to come chasing you for $9 when your country's about to go bust.
So, yeah, I just think if there's a web, just imagine if most companies were like this, then you sort of.
You don't get this ridiculous economic system that we seem to have right now.
So we're probably getting a bit philosophical right now, but, yeah, that's kind of how I view it.
Yeah.
Omer (33:11.750)
All right, it's time for the lightning round.
So I'm going to ask you a series of questions and I'd like you to answer them as quickly as you can.
George Palmer (33:19.110)
You're going to use the same questions that you prepped me with, right?
You're not going to change these around.
Omer (33:25.750)
They're completely different questions.
All right, what's the best piece of business advice that you ever received?
George Palmer (33:33.930)
This is a tricky one, but I'm going to go for DHH as he's known in Rubio and rail circles.
He's the guy who created Rails and he built this infamous slide and it said, step one, great idea.
Step three, profit.
What's step two?
Everyone wants to know what step two is, right?
Step two is to charge, and I absolutely love that.
So step one, great idea.
Step two, charge.
Step three, profit.
Omer (34:03.130)
What book would you recommend to our audience and why?
George Palmer (34:07.290)
I've got a few.
The four hour work week 37 signals getting real.
And Paul Graham's got a series of great essays online, but I think he's made that into a book.
So then I can claim those.
If I'm starting a software business, there will be the three books that I'm reading, but I also want to throw a few others in there.
Mark Sisson's Primal Blueprint is about exercising and eating the way that humans evolved.
And that's a lot of what I base my fitness and diet around.
But it works extremely well for me.
So that's a little bonus one I'd throw in there as well.
Omer (34:44.500)
I have to check that one out.
Okay, what's one attribute or characteristic in your mind of a successful entrepreneur?
George Palmer (34:53.999)
I'm going for curiosity.
I love people that just say the question stuff.
Why is that?
Like that?
Why is that?
That's bullshit.
That's a really bad way of doing it.
Let's do it better.
I can do better than that and I think that's a great attribute to have as an entrepreneur.
Omer (35:13.759)
What's your favorite personal productivity tool or habit?
George Palmer (35:19.450)
It would be a toss up between Evernote, although I use a different client.
I use something called alternote because the Evernote client's part of bullshit, in my opinion.
So I use that as a dumping ground to write notes on stuff that will be useful later in life.
So for example, our process for hiring people is in there, but that's really more just like a dumping.
And I think in terms of productivity, people get hung up on these tools that track the amount of time that you're spending on Facebook and randomly surfing the web.
I personally use that as a sign.
If I'm spending a lot of time on Facebook or surfing the web, then I need a break and I'm tired.
So go have a power nap or go and take a 20 minute stroll in the park or something.
I don't need a tool to measure that.
I think you should be using that as a sign that you've actually pushed too hard.
You need to back up a bit and give yourself a break.
So my favorite productivity tool or have it, is to have a break.
Omer (36:21.580)
Love it.
What's a new business idea or a crazy idea that you have in your head that you'd love to pursue if you had the extra time?
George Palmer (36:33.420)
I have two ideas which I'm actively considering, so I won't talk about those.
But if I was starting another SaaS right now, I'd probably look at help ticket software.
So we evaluated them all and we went with Help Scout found out was the best of bunch.
But to be honest with you, I've got a lot of problems with that find they're all bloated.
I find they're all extremely well marketed, but the product doesn't deliver.
I Think I do a much better job of that.
So, yeah, if I was looking right now, it's a crowded market space, don't get me wrong, it'd be hard to get into, but I think you could do a really good product there compared to what I've seen.
Omer (37:16.590)
What's an interesting or fun fact about you that most people don't know?
George Palmer (37:23.870)
A couple of summers ago, myself and a friend built a traditional Italian pizza oven in my back garden.
So yeah, I have a traditional Pompeii style pizza oven which is stone, like a stone dome where you cook the pizzas on and you can stick the wood in and burn it.
And it takes a couple of hours to get up to temperature a little bit like you'll see in the restaurants.
But the restaurants ones are mass produced.
This is a individually built and designed one in my back garden.
It's got a sort of styling that matches the traditional London houses.
So yeah, pizza party at mine, I guess is the.
Omer (38:04.150)
So wait, you built a stone dome oven in your backyard?
George Palmer (38:08.790)
Yeah, that's correct.
Yes.
There's the oven part and then it's in what they call a casing, which basically imagine the dome gets up to like 700, 800 degrees.
You don't want to touch that.
So it's actually.
If you go to my Twitter profile and look at the background picture, I'm Giorgio 1999 on Twitter, you'll see a picture of it and it perhaps will picture will speak a thousand words rather than me trying to describe it.
Omer (38:32.880)
All right, so I will definitely look that up.
And finally, what is one of your most important passions outside of your work?
George Palmer (38:39.520)
I think it's really fitness.
I think I touched on this earlier.
I love it from a productivity point of view.
It really helps me focus.
I have a lot more energy.
But I also love the parallels that there are to business in general.
So the great thing about sport is it's really hard to cheat and get away with it.
I mean, I know there's drug problems, but put those two aside for a moment.
If you look at the guys that are performing the best in say 100 meter sprint or a marathon, you can learn a lot of lessons from them in terms of what are they doing in terms of personal habits.
You know, they are extremely disciplined in their timings.
They're extremely.
They spend a lot of time worrying about rest and recovery.
If you look at Team sky, which is the British cycling team and has dominated the Tour de France the last few years, they've got a great philosophy called the accumulation of Marginal gains.
And that is elite level sport or elite level business or anything.
It's really hard to sort of get 10% on your competitors.
But what if you could look at every area of your competitor and just nick 1% on them?
What if your design could be 1% better?
What if your support could be 1% better?
What IF your product could have 1% better functionality and then you can add up all those 1% and you suddenly find yourself 10% ahead?
So, I mean, I'm really, really into it.
I spent a lot of time thinking about it and reading about it, but I think it's one of the few areas where it's very difficult to cheat and get away with it in business.
I mean, it's not the same concept of cheating, but, you know, you might have somebody that's done extremely well, but he was given a million dollars to start up by his dad.
And, you know, it's pretty easy to make a million dollars once you've got a million dollars in the bank, so.
Right.
Omer (40:27.780)
Yeah.
George Palmer (40:28.140)
So in terms of like, performance and personal productivity, which I'm kind of obsessed with, then, I just love the parallels to the sporting world.
I find I get a lot out of that.
Wonderful.
Omer (40:38.260)
George, it's.
It's been an absolute pleasure chatting with you.
I think we could just easily keep going for much longer, but I really appreciate you taking the time to do this.
Now, if folks want to find out more about Sendowl, they can go to sendowl.com and if they want to get in touch with you, what's the best way for them to do that?
George Palmer (41:05.930)
Well, thanks to Posterous, I don't have a website anymore.
I think Twitter tends to be the way that I interact with people these days.
So if you just go to twitter.com georgio that's G E O R G I O.
And then an underscore 1999.
So one and then three nines.
Then that's me on Twitter and you can send me a message on that and I'll reply.
Omer (41:31.890)
We'll add that to your Twitter handle to the show notes so people can just grab it from there, too.
George, thanks again.
And it is what, almost 9 o'?
George Palmer (41:44.850)
Clock?
Omer (41:45.690)
No, almost 8 o'?
George Palmer (41:47.010)
Clock.
Seven, seven?
20.
It's okay.
Omer (41:50.090)
I'm losing it.
Okay, great.
Thanks again.
I wish you all the best and I look forward to finding out what you get up to with Sendow in the next year.
George Palmer (42:02.890)
Thanks, Emma.
It's been an absolute pleasure.
Omer (42:04.810)
Cheers.
