Omer (00:09.280)
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.
In this episode, I I took to Josh Haynham, the co founder and CEO of Interact, a platform for creating quizzes, assessments and giveaways that help you build your email list or qualify leads.
I originally interviewed Josh in 2015 in episode 57 where he and his college friends had bootstrapped Interact and were doing around 15k in MRR.
Today they're doing around two and a half million dollars in arrangement.
But there's a lot more to this story than you might think.
It took them five years to hit 1 million ARR and then they experienced rapid growth.
During the pandemic, it was looking like the start of the classic hockey stick growth curve, but then growth came to a standstill and revenue was flat for about a year.
In this episode, we talk about the realities and challenges of growing a SaaS business.
We dig into how they manage to grow the business to over 2 million arrangements.
We explore why growth then declined and revenue plateaued.
And we talk about all the things the team did and learned for a year trying to figure out how to grow their business again.
So I hope you enjoy it.
Josh, welcome to the show.
Josh Haynam (01:37.429)
Yeah, thanks for having me on.
Omer (01:38.630)
You have a favorite quote, something that inspires or motivates you that you can share with us.
Josh Haynam (01:42.190)
Yeah, it's sort of inspirational and motivational, but it's kind of anti in a way.
Um, basically the quote is if you don't take breaks, then the breaks will take you.
And like, it's relevant to probably a lot of the audience that's trying to start stuff because it's a, it's a real thing.
Omer (02:01.260)
So tell us about Interact.
What does the product do, who's it for, and what's the main problem you're helping to solve?
Josh Haynam (02:06.340)
Yeah, so the product is a quiz builder that does personalized product recommendations as well as email list building.
So lead generation.
The main problems that it solves twofold.
One is to recommend products and services for e commerce brands and online education, things like that, where you have multiple offerings.
And then the second thing is that it collects email addresses and then segments those emails based on quiz outcomes and answers to questions.
So really big on the data side, which is now being dubbed zero party data.
So data that's declared to be given to you as the brand.
So those are really the two big Problems that it solves the lead gen product recommendation.
Now this third one with capturing really clean and valuable and declared to be given to you data.
Omer (02:58.910)
So the business was founded in 2014.
When you and I first spoke, I think you were doing about 15k in mrr.
Where are you guys right now?
Josh Haynam (03:12.250)
Yeah, we're at about 217 in MRR.
So decent growth.
Omer (03:17.330)
Nice.
So about 2 1/2 million a year.
That's what you're doing.
Cool.
So what I want to do today is talk a little bit about just the early days, how you came up with the idea and how you got those initial customers and got that initial traction.
We obviously covered that in a previous episode, but that was a long, long time back.
So it's probably a good chance for us to refresh and do a second take and do a better job at telling the story.
And then I want to get into what's been happening over the last few years.
We often hear about founders who got that traction.
Find product market fit, hockey stick growth curve.
And the reality is that it's never that straightforward.
And there are some interesting challenges that you and the team faced with growing Interact particularly there was a period of time where you went from rapid growth to just the business plateauing for quite a while.
And so I want to talk about that and sort of learn some of the lessons and what you went through and how you broke through.
But also just generally, I think it would be good to dig into the realities of building a SaaS business because we often hear a lot, especially on social media, about how easy it is to build a SaaS business.
And honestly, I think anytime I see the word easy and SaaS down there, I'm just like, don't pay attention.
So let's dig into that.
I think there's some interesting things to to talk about here, but why don't we start by you telling us about where the idea actually came from for this business.
Josh Haynam (05:00.070)
Yeah, that's a good place to start.
So the idea initially from my co founders and I, building websites for people.
Like I said, 2014 officially launched, we started working on this 2012, 2013.
So quite a long time ago.
And prior to that we were doing website development for individual clients.
We were in college, so, you know, pretty bare bones type of stuff.
But back in that time, you know, some of the website builders may have been launched but they were still pretty new and clunky, difficult to use.
You couldn't really customize a site.
So if you wanted something that looked custom, that looked good, you didn't have, you know, like webflow now.
Right.
Which is probably on the forefront of being able to just make something completely custom.
Back then your only option was hiring a developer.
So that's what we did.
And we build sites for people but really the main metric that everyone looked at was the number of email subscribers that they were getting.
So you know, we'd build this beautiful website and then all they'd really want to know is like, how many people join my list.
And that was interesting to us because we're like, why is everyone so focused on this?
Then it started to make more sense as we learned more about how everything works.
And you know, most people don't buy on the first visit to a website.
They usually buy 3, 6, 9, 12 months down the road.
So that list is super important.
Then one of our clients requested a quiz to be built for email capture.
I think he wanted it connected to aweber, which was, you know, one of two email platforms at the time.
The other one was mailchimp.
Now there's a thousand.
But yeah, he wanted that to be done.
We built this really simple quiz for him.
I think it was like, what's your sales style?
He was like a sales coach and that thing converted it like 40, 50%, you know, cold traffic into email subscribers and nothing else we built was anywhere near that.
Our sites were getting 1 or 2%, you know, industry average for like a website.
And the quiz just did so much better.
So then, being naive 19 year olds, we had the brilliant idea to make a platform for building quizzes.
And platforms were just not a thing back then.
Like I said, there was a couple early website platforms but the idea that you could give somebody tools to create their own content that was, you know, custom branded and looked like their website, that was so far out of left field.
But I think our naivety served us well because we just committed to doing it and that was the origins of it, that was where it came from.
And now it's been almost a decade since then.
Omer (08:03.810)
So how long did it take for you to get the first 10 paying customers?
Were you able to just go back to your existing clients that you've been building websites for and sell the product to them?
Josh Haynam (08:14.880)
Yeah, that's a funny story because when we tried to go to people to build custom quizzes, the most anybody was willing to pay.
And we were terrible at sales.
Still are.
But we charged them 200 bucks and it took us like two weeks to build that quiz for them because they wanted it to be custom because, you know, we were building custom Websites, So they weren't, you know, wanting to use our platform.
They wanted it to be custom, like their site.
Two weeks paid us 200 bucks.
Not a really good salary for three people.
So that, that really did not go well.
Then we tried doing direct outreach and sales.
Like I said, not our forte, not our thing.
Didn't get any customers out of that.
Then we started building up content marketing in a general sense, like how to do Internet marketing.
That didn't work either.
We got traffic to the site, but no one was looking for quizzes.
And then finally the thing that did break us through was just writing very technical guides on how to build and launch quizzes, which is still a huge part of our content marketing strategy to this day.
And that's what got us our first 10 paying customers.
But that whole process of custom to sales, to content, to specific content was about a year before we got those first 10 customers.
Omer (09:46.160)
And then the content that you were writing, was it showing people how to use Interact to build these solutions or was it just kind of like general generic kind of content?
Josh Haynam (09:54.880)
It was using Interact, but it was kind of both.
Like, it was a lot of the general principles of like, if you're going to write questions for a quiz, this is how you think about the answer choices and how the logic correlates to the outcomes so that you can make something that's accurate, so you can make something that actually delivers a result.
Here's how to do that in an automated way and like have it connect up to your email and here's how to segment leads.
So just a lot of very like specific.
Here's how it works.
You totally could have used it to, you know, hire a developer and build the same thing.
And I'm sure, I mean, actually a lot of people do, but because it's all easy to do and Interact and there's, you know, a link to go and build a quiz like this with Interact and we take care of all the stuff behind the scenes for you.
And so, yeah, either way.
Omer (10:50.210)
So between 2014 and 2019 you had steady growth, nothing kind of, you know, ground shattering.
And then was it in, in 2019 that you hit about a million in ARR?
Josh Haynam (11:05.860)
Yeah, actually on my 20, whatever year I was at that point, my birthday at 29, 2019, we hit 1 million ARR.
So.
So just about six years we launched the website August of 2013.
So just about six years.
Omer (11:22.720)
Okay.
Was it still content marketing that was driving the bulk of the growth?
Had you tapped into any other marketing channels and got them working for you so what was going on at that time?
Josh Haynam (11:35.440)
Yeah, we had added a new one by that point.
We had tried a bunch of stuff.
We tried doing sales multiple times.
We tried other like outreach strategies, content strategies, a lot of stuff that didn't work.
The one that did land was we started partnering with a lot of web designers who help people set up their websites and their online presence.
And that worked really well because they're the ones that are usually recommending tools and resources to their small business clients.
And so that was accounting for 10ish percent of revenue, maybe 15 by 2019, but the bulk of it was still content strategy.
Omer (12:18.760)
Okay.
And then working with these designers, was it just like a typical affiliate type relationship there?
Josh Haynam (12:25.400)
Yeah, affiliate stuff.
You know, ongoing commissions.
You know, a lot of them we have personal relationships with, and we do to this day.
There's ones that I've known for seven or eight years at this point.
And you know, it's a win, win because for them, it's also introducing something new and exciting to their clients.
So it's a value add.
And then for us it's great because those designers typically help their clients set up the quizzes and so we don't have to do as much of like the support and onboarding and that kind of stuff.
Omer (12:57.070)
So that was middle of 2019.
And then tell me what, what happened as we moved into sort of the early days of the pandemic?
How did that affect your business?
Josh Haynam (13:08.690)
Yeah, so we grew really strong through the end of 2019.
We were growing really strong in the beginning of 2020.
Pandemic hit.
We dropped everything, you know, everything dropped for four weeks or so.
Really not a lot of activity on any part while everyone was trying to figure out what to do.
And then it shot back up and grew very rapidly through the end of 2020 into the first few months of 2021.
It grew extremely fast.
And then right around the time that things started to reopen in 2021 and the world went through the, the fun period where we opened and closed, we 50 times in a row.
It really threw off our customer base of small businesses, small business owners, often young parents with kids going in and out of school and things like that.
And there's other factors too.
And we certainly our hearts go out to all of the pain that was caused through everything that happened during the pandemic.
But for us, yeah, 2021, springtime, things really slowed down when, when the world started to go through that fluctuating period.
And it stayed like that for just about a year.
So through this spring, just this fluctuation of good months, bad months, good month, bad months.
Funnily following the.
The macro trends of the world.
When the world settles down, we.
We do well.
When it gets crazy again, we don't do well.
Omer (14:59.170)
So, okay, so the business was growing or growth strikes accelerate before the pandemic.
So in 2019, through the pandemic, it grew.
Your business grew even faster, as I think, obviously during that time, there was a lot of businesses that were either moving offline to online or more of them trying to figure out how they could do more online than they had been doing.
And so, you know, naturally looking for different tools like Interact to help them, you know, execute on those plans.
And then as things started to open up in 2021, you saw a direct correlation there where growth basically plateaued.
Did you see a decline or was it just.
It just stayed at those sort of pandemic kind of levels.
Josh Haynam (15:53.580)
In terms of revenue, it pretty much plateaued.
I mean, growth certainly slowed down, but we were still getting a lot of customers on board.
I mean, a lot of our stuff is word of mouth and, you know, through our partnerships and organic content.
So there's.
There's really not this factor where it can just drop to nothing.
Like, you know, I've heard some stories with the Facebook changes with privacy and stuff like that, where businesses have literally just dropped to zero.
That's not something that we really have to worry about because of how we get customers.
But, yeah, pretty much just plateaued.
We were getting the same amount of people that we were losing, and that was what was going on.
Omer (16:40.220)
So that was for about a year where revenue was basically flat, I think.
What were you doing in AR around that time?
Josh Haynam (16:50.300)
2.3, 2.4 or something like that.
Omer (16:54.140)
So that was early 2021 through to earlier this year.
And this is not unusual.
Josh Haynam (17:02.320)
Right.
Omer (17:02.600)
There's a lot of businesses who get stuck in these kind of growth plateaus.
And this kind of goes back to what we talked about earlier.
It's like, you know, no, it's not.
Once you hit, you know, a million ARR, life is sweet and rosy and no, it's just a different set of challenges that now start to appear, and they need different solutions and different ways of thinking that, you know, might have worked in the past, but now, you know, there's.
The dynamics have changed.
So in addition to the pandemic, there were also a couple of other factors as well.
And I know competitors was one of them.
Tell me a little bit about what you saw happening in the landscape over that period, yeah.
Josh Haynam (17:44.959)
So one of the things that started to happen a lot was we rank really well for a lot of the terms about around how to build quizzes.
So all that strategic content I was talking about, like how do you put these things together, how do you formulate a quiz?
And ads just started to stack up at the top of those pages, 3, 4, 5, 6 high at this point.
I don't know why they don't just make the entire thing just ads.
Because oftentimes the first page you're scrolling before you see an organic result and being bootstrapped.
It's not something we can compete in those spaces.
The competition for a click on strategic posts that we would write, it's like three to four dollars per click.
And we were getting 100 visits a day on some of these articles before and we saw that drop precipitously down to 2015, something like that.
So, you know, 5x drop due to just a bunch of ads being stuck at the top of the pages.
So that was, that was definitely a factor that, that affected as well, just the entrant of a lot of new players in this space running a lot of ads.
Omer (19:05.040)
Tell me a little bit about the makeup of the, the competition.
Because if, if you've got new entrants coming in and they're able to spend a bunch of money on AdWords, either they're targeting more upmarket, maybe they have higher price points that allow them to spend more on a customer acquisition, or they just have a crapload of money they've raised and they're just throwing to see what they can get out of it.
So what was the situation there?
What type of competitors were these and why do you think they were able to spend money on AdWords as a way to acquire customers?
Josh Haynam (19:45.690)
Yeah, there can be some of both, but I think the main thing that happens is a lot of competitors that have entered the space and this isn't the first time this has happened.
It's happened three or four times now in our 10 years.
What a lot happens is the product gets advertised as a product, but it's really a service.
And so what a lot of these companies are doing is they're just basically acting as an agency.
And so they'll get someone in that wants to build a quiz, but then they'll upsell them on done for you Service that they'll charge 3, 4, $5,000 for.
And in that way they're able to make those ads really worthwhile.
In terms of its lead gen for an agency, um, that's not a model that, that we're interested in.
Like, we want to build a product that's self service and easy to use.
And so that's the main thing that actually happens is it's, it's a lot of agencies running ads against these terms.
And then they often have kind of a lightweight tool that they use that is not really self service.
It's more like done for you and then they'll deliver you a finished product.
Omer (21:03.030)
Got it.
Okay, so, so that explains a little bit about that, because if they're acquiring a effectively a client, then they know that they're going to generate the value of that client is probably going to be in the thousands of dollars versus paying for a product at 50 bucks a month or, or something like that.
And then did you see competitors also creating similar content which affected your organic search traffic?
Or was this just a, a play between AdWords competing with the organic content that you had out there?
Josh Haynam (21:42.500)
Yeah, I mean, a little bit.
But we do have, you know, strong SEO because we've been around for a long time.
We have a lot of partnerships and people write about us and that kind of stuff.
So we have really strong domain authority.
And so it's mostly just ads that are stuck at the top of the pages now.
Omer (22:02.120)
So during that period where revenue was flat.
Tell me about some of the things you did to try and move the needle that didn't work.
And then let's talk about how you managed to eventually figure things out and found a way through, because you've got revenue growing again.
But I want to try and understand like, the process you went through, because it's not, it's really as, as, as simple as, hey, we got this problem, got this idea, let's try it, and you know, we're off to the races again.
There's usually a lot of trial and error.
So I want to understand, like, what were some of the things that you guys went through?
Josh Haynam (22:39.650)
Yeah.
So I would say the biggest thing that we tried to do was we tried to step one, circle out from the core of what we do.
So we work with a lot of small business owners, a lot of creatives, a lot of people that are building products and services online, whether it's a digital product or a physical product.
Right.
They're creators.
And so what we tried to do was build more of a brand around reaching creators at a broader level and entering that market.
I think the main reasons why it didn't work is we just didn't have enough time.
You know, we learned with, with Interact that Just takes a really long time to build any sort of content machine, you know, years, many years in most cases before you're really moving the needle.
And so we kind of just ran out of time in terms of needing something to move faster.
And so we're not stopping that.
We're still going to continue some of those initiatives.
Like we launched a really great podcast that someone on our team is the host of.
We launched a bunch of great content initiatives and those things are still things that I think will pay off in the future.
But I think we picked some things that were a bit too long term for us to really start moving the needle.
And we didn't have enough things that would have really pushed the ball along now.
And that was the main pitfall.
I think in my head, I'm very much visionary and it's like, oh, yeah, this is going to be big.
And I still think it is, but sometimes this is going to be big needs to be balanced out with what do we need to do next week and next month to keep this thing growing?
So I think that that was the biggest misstep in my view.
Omer (24:40.130)
And then you had everyone on the team focus a lot more on innovations, new ideas and things like that.
How did that play out and what were some of the things that worked or didn't work from that?
Josh Haynam (24:53.010)
Yeah, so I think that's a big part of what has led to us growing again, because the team rebuilt our entire onboarding system.
You know, how we take a customer from interested to starting a trial, to building a quiz, to launching that quiz.
So part of our team focuses on that interested to starting a trial.
And that's kind of like our marketing Org, and there's a couple of really smart people working on that.
How do we diversify our content?
How do we get more pieces out there?
How do we build these more automated flows from that into somebody being ready to start a trial?
And then we have another team that works, picks up the ball, where somebody does start a trial and make sure that they have everything they need to launch a well implemented quiz.
Because there's a huge difference between just launching a quiz generically and launching something that's really well done because one will work, the other one won't.
And so that's really what the team did over the last year, is figured out those two ginormous problems and implemented a bunch of different and varying solutions to make that whole process smoother and better.
And it's paying pretty huge dividends.
Omer (26:14.020)
You also took a slightly different approach with the content marketing in terms of creating, like, templates.
Tell me a little bit about that.
What was, what exactly were you doing there?
Josh Haynam (26:23.740)
Yeah, so that's like the thing that I'm personally most excited about, because from day one of this company, the biggest problem everybody has had the entire time is what quiz do I write and how do I write that quiz?
And I am not joking when there are people that are still trying to figure that out who were initially interested in 2013.
So it's.
It's a decade problem.
It's the type of thing where it sits in the back of your mind for years and years and years.
And you know that if you launch something that's great, it will be effective.
And I think that's probably part of why it can be so hard is people have very high expectations because they know that this strategy works really well.
And so for them, they're like, well, I don't want to launch it until I've got something great.
And then it's nine years on and it's still sitting in a doc somewhere.
So what we started building about three years ago is this system where we have an amazing team of writers who write quizzes across different industries.
And then we have technology where anybody can use those quizzes within their own Interact account and then customize the content.
So you're starting with something that's already done and then modifying it.
We have a few hundred of these now, and we're launching hundreds more each year.
So now the process, instead of like, let me open up a doc and figure this out is let me copy this quiz into my account.
And these are only available for our paid members.
So it's a limited number of people who do have access to these.
And then you can go from that to launching the thing in couple hours at the most, instead of potentially being stuck for years.
And those pages also act as, you know, organic pages on Google where people can preview those quizzes and see what it's about before they sign up.
And so that's been a game changer in terms of how people use our product.
And I think it has unlimited potential.
Omer (28:42.720)
So give me an example of a type of template that somebody might use.
Josh Haynam (28:46.160)
Yeah, so one that's really popular is what's your skin type?
What's your true skin type?
A lot of E commerce brands use that to recommend products.
So you can take that template, copy it into your account, add your products at the end, or redirect at the end to your own products on your Shopify site, connect it up to your email, and Then launch it in two hours or less.
And that's a prime example.
On the, you know, the other side of the house where we work with a lot of coaches, a really popular one is like, what's your true purpose?
Because you can use that to help people find, you know, what should you learn, what should you focus on, what hobbies should you have?
That kind of stuff.
Same thing.
You can copy it into your account, add some links at the end, connect your email, ready to go.
And that one's even easier, like half an hour.
So those are a couple examples.
Omer (29:43.990)
Okay, so then each one of these templates has a corresponding landing page and then that's the piece that you're trying to get indexed in Google.
Are people actually searching for these types of things like your purpose quiz or something like that?
Josh Haynam (30:00.880)
Yeah, like a lot of people.
It's crazy.
Um, it's, I mean, I don't even know the full traffic those pages get, but it's a lot.
Like some of these more popular ones can have 10, 20, 30,000 searches a month for a particular quiz.
Yeah.
Omer (30:19.190)
And then obviously that's a super high intent traffic.
I could, I could try to compete with you and write an article about how to create a what's your purpose type quiz.
But the big benefit that you have is that we've already done that for you, right.
We already have a template, couple of clicks and you can start using it.
And I think that's the kind of the interesting piece here because as you mentioned earlier when we were chatting is this, people can copy articles and posts and stuff like that, but once you actually start investing and creating these type of templates, that's not that easy to copy.
Josh Haynam (30:58.780)
No, it's extremely difficult.
I mean, even myself as you know, doing this for 10 years, I will spend a week writing a really solid template.
And so having this team, and they're pretty much the only real experts on this because it's such a niche industry that's also still new.
And we, you know, we have a partnership with them and they're able to put out, you know, three or four a week across that team.
And so, yeah, I mean even if you were to run ads against it, they wouldn't be relevant because you'd have to actually go and write these templates.
And that's something that we have a very unique expertise.
And you know, it's borderline intellectual property where it's like we have this method from learning over the last 10 years of what makes a good quiz that would be extremely difficult to replicate.
Which is why I don't even care, telling everybody what we're doing, because it's like, cool, go try it.
Like, it's really hard.
And best, best of luck.
Omer (32:16.310)
Now, you're a pretty lean and mean team.
You've got a.
About what, eight FTEs.
I know you had to let a few people go as you went through some of these kind of challenging periods.
Tell me a little bit about that.
What, what was going on there?
I mean, you didn't go crazy and hire like, you know, dozens of people here.
Josh Haynam (32:35.960)
No.
Yeah.
And the folks that we've had to scale back on had contractor agreements.
But for us, we take our relationships extremely seriously and we take people's mental health and their lives into consideration with every move that we're making.
And so it is really painful to have to scale back even if somebody's like, technically just a contractor, because we care about each individual.
And so, yeah, through that time of, of the slowness, we really had to dial it down, cut maybe 15 to 20% of our expenses.
We didn't have to have to because we've always been very prudent.
But for us, we're, we're much more of a fan of doing those things early.
And especially, you know, the line in the sand for us is our FTEs, because we, we have had to let FTEs go in the past, and it's not something that we want to do at this point.
So we're very cautious and slow with anybody moving to ft. Everybody starts as a contractor and slowly moves over.
So, yeah, we had to do that.
And my hope is that everybody will be able to come back at some point in the future.
And that's pretty much how it was communicated out as, you know, things have shifted and growth didn't go as expected for a while.
And so the hope there is that once it starts rolling again, which I do expect it to, then we can resume those relationships because they're all incredibly talented people that I would recommend to literally anyone for their services.
Omer (34:27.240)
Looking back at the last eight, nine years and some of the experiences that you've been through, particularly over the last few years in terms of this roller coaster ride of rapid growth and then things coming to a standstill and then staying like that for a long time, what are some of the takeaways that, you know, if you were going back in time and sharing some wisdom with yourself, what would you be telling yourself?
Josh Haynam (34:54.049)
Yeah, I think there's two main things.
The one lesson that I feel I always have to keep learning, I don't know why this is like just such a blind spot for me, but the one on this is one side of it.
There's two sides to this.
This learnings that I have.
One side is the shorter term, right?
So like I was talking about, things start to slow down.
The initiatives that we initially put in place were very long term things that would pay off in five years.
And it's not the first time that I've done that.
Like when we switched over to starting this company after running our agency, we lived barely, barely lived financially for like five years because it took so long to build this product and enter this market.
In my head I always knew it would happen, but in retrospect I was like, I probably would have kept doing agency work or done like a part time job or something just so that didn't have to be so painful.
And same thing this time around.
Like we've, we learned much quicker this time.
It only took us a year instead of five to switch gears and do, you know, some shorter term things just to keep things going and not lose sight of the long term, but in the interim, like do things that keep the finances going.
So that's one lesson.
And then on the completely opposite side of the spectrum, I would say always do things that light me up.
And that's something that we are super passionate about for everybody on our team.
Having tasks and responsibilities that take up in, in times where things are really hard, Maybe it's only 20% of your time that you really get to work on things that you love doing.
And then when times are better, maybe you can do it 50% of the time.
But for me, like it is writing content, like strategic content, something about putting a complicated concept into very simple blocks that are digestible.
I find just fascinating.
It's like to me, it's the closest thing to building something that I will get to experience on the Internet.
I love building things and so always having that be part of my cadence no matter how difficult things get, like it's not worth it to go 100% on just trying to get money in the door because you burn out really fast and you know, you'll just start to question why you're doing it in the first place.
And so two very opposite ends of the spectrum, but both are necessary.
Omer (37:38.590)
Yeah, Love it.
All right, we should wrap up.
So we've got the lightning round.
You know the drill.
Seven quick fire questions.
Just try to answer them as quickly as you can.
All right, what's the best piece of business advice you've ever received?
Josh Haynam (37:55.250)
Move slow and break things.
Like move slow on most things and then break things on the stuff that needs to be experimented with.
Omer (38:07.250)
What book would you recommend to our audience and why?
Josh Haynam (38:10.050)
Right now?
I'm a big fan of Made in Japan.
It's the story of Sony and it's because it is about building a company through tough times, which I think we're headed into more of.
Omer (38:21.670)
What's one attribute or characteristic in your mind of a successful founder?
Josh Haynam (38:25.910)
I think empathy is the biggest one.
Understanding how your customers feel, how your team feels.
You can get by just being a bulldozer, but that's not a good long term strategy in my opinion.
Omer (38:39.030)
What's your favorite personal productivity tool or habit?
Josh Haynam (38:43.030)
Journaling?
For sure.
There's something about writing down an idea that's in your head that takes it out of your head and then you stop obsessing over it and it's just like written down.
So journaling, what's a new or crazy
Omer (38:56.380)
business idea you'd have to pursue if you had the extra time?
Josh Haynam (38:58.900)
Oh, I've been like telling this to everybody.
I want to make a blockchain search engine that is a combination between a voting system and a search engine so you can vote on which results are actually helpful to you.
Omer (39:13.380)
What's an interesting or fun fact about you that most people don't know?
Josh Haynam (39:16.950)
I grew up in a farm town in a family of seven children.
Wow.
Omer (39:22.790)
Did you tell me that before?
Is that a new one that you've been hiding?
Josh Haynam (39:25.350)
I don't think I ever told you that before.
Omer (39:28.550)
There you go.
They keep coming.
And then finally, what's one of your most important passions outside of your work?
Josh Haynam (39:33.670)
Building things and being outdoors.
So my dream would be to build a cabin in the outdoors and be able to hike all the time.
So those two things.
Omer (39:44.460)
All right, great.
Well, thanks for joining me.
Thanks for sharing the update on where you are.
Congratulations.
Breaking through into multiple seven figures and hopefully unlocking some more growth in the business.
So we'll have to touch base maybe next year sometime and see where you are.
If people want to learn more about Interact or give it a try, they can go to try interact.com and if folks want to get in touch with you, what's the best way for them to do that?
Josh Haynam (40:18.630)
Yeah, I usually hang out a bit on LinkedIn.
You can message me there.
You can just search my name.
It'll come up.
And that's.
Yeah, that's where I usually check online.
Omer (40:28.390)
Okay, cool.
We'll include a link to your profile in the show notes.
Josh Haynam (40:33.270)
Great.
Omer (40:33.930)
Thanks Josh.
It's been a pleasure.
Great to catch up, as always, and wish you and the team the best of success.
Josh Haynam (40:39.050)
Yeah.
Thank you very much.
Appreciate it.
Omer (40:40.690)
Cheers.
