Demandwell: From Concierge MVP to a 7-Figure SaaS Business – with Mitch Causey [303]

[00:00:00] Omer: Welcome to another episode of The SaaS Podcast. I'm your host, Omer Khan. And this is a show where I interview proven founders and industry experts who share their stories, strategies, and insights to help you build, launch and grow your SaaS business.

[00:00:25] In this episode, I talked to Mitch Causey, the co-founder and CEO of DemandWell. A SaaS company that provides software and coaching to help B2B SaaS, marketers turn organic search into a repeatable source of revenue. When Mitch launched DemandWell, it was just a one-person SEO agency. Mitch worked with one client at a time, and his main tool was a spreadsheet which he'd create for each client and use to help grow their organic search traffic.

[00:00:53] But he quickly realized that this business couldn't scale and building a software product to replace his spreadsheets, seemed like the next logical step to help him grow the business. In about 18 months since launching the SaaS product, Mitch has been SaaS to turn DemandWell into a seven-figure business with a team of 16 people.

[00:01:16] One big reason why he's been able to grow so quick, is because he spent the first 18 months before that providing a service and helping clients manually, he effectively built an MVP without any software. It's a concept known as a concierge MVP. And it's an approach that can work for a lot of different types of startups.

[00:01:39] Many founders get stuck, figuring out how to build an MVP or spend way too much time trying to build that product. And the reality is your MVP doesn't have to be software. It can just as easily be a service. So having a concierge MVP can help you quickly validate your idea, find customers, learn more about your target market, start generating some revenue quickly, and even presale your SaaS product to some of those customers, which can help fund development. And that's exactly what Mitch was able to do. So it's an interesting interview and I hope you enjoy it, Mitch. Welcome to the show.

[00:02:13] Mitch: Thanks, Omer. Glad to be here.

[00:02:16] Omer: Do you have a quote, something that inspires or motivates you that you can share with us?

[00:02:21] Mitch: I do. There's a lot of quotes in my mind, a lot of quotes that have inspired me over time, but I've got one that it just keeps sticking in my head. And I don't know. We'll see what folks think about this, but I heard someone say when I approach my death bed, I do not want to be on cruise control. I want to be screeching around the corner.

[00:02:46] Omer: Okay. I haven't heard that one before. Yeah.

[00:02:49] Mitch: And what this person meant by that was that we are all given relatively a short amount of time on earth alive, and just expressing the idea of making every moment count and all the way to the end. There's story after story that followed their life plan is work till they're 65 and then sit in a lazy boy for next.

[00:03:13] However many years until they die. And that just is not inspiring to me. What is inspiring to me is to think that even up to the day that I die, I can actually have an impact on other people and help other people grow for that entire time.

[00:03:29] Omer: Great. Love it. Okay. So tell us about Demandwell, what does the product do, who is it for, and what's the problem you're helping to solve?

[00:03:37] Mitch: Yeah, absolutely Demandwell is an SEO coaching solution for B2B, SaaS marketers, lots of buzzy words in there, but all actually handpicked because they're all important. We're focused on SEO. We're focused on SaaS market and everything that we do with a coaching mindset to help others grow.

[00:03:56] That's our mission as a company that we help others grow. And so that's how we approach everything. The kind of key problem of how we help others grow really stems from a stat that we actually found from another or from a data dump tool in the space it's called Hrefs. I'm sure a lot of folks listening have experienced, but they actually looked at over a billion pages on the internet and they found that 91% of those pages get zero organic search traffic from google.

[00:04:27] Omer: That's mind-blowing.

[00:04:29] Mitch: That's 910 million out of a billion pages get nothing. And so we're flipping the script on that. Take a look at it. We looked at a bunch of demand pages that our customers have created using our platform and our process.

[00:04:45] And we found the 89% of those pages actually were getting traffic. So 91% of most get none 89% of content created using our method actually does get traffic. And the way that we've done that in the way that we think about all, this really comes down to one methodology, which is what we call PACE. PACE stands for a plan, attract, convert, and evaluate.

[00:05:11] And those are all really basic words. And, but they're all really important. And it's how we think about everything. That's how we think about how we coach from a people perspective. It's about how we create new features in our platform. They all tie back to one of those things. So the way we talked about it is that in order for an organic search to be successful, and to break that 91% stat, you have to have all four of these components, which are having a plan of how you're going to attract and convert attention then actually going out and attracting that attention from organic search.

[00:05:43] Once you have that, make sure that it is converting well and then evaluate how you attracted them converted cycle that back into the next plan and do that over and over again. The secret of success in SEO is not a flip of the switch or pay someone a certain amount. It's about long-term iteration, understanding, having measurement in place to understand how you're doing and understanding where you should be going and then having the game plan, how to get there and actually doing it and doing that over and over again.

[00:06:13] Omer: Great. So let's, I want to start by talking about where you came up with the idea for this product but before we do that. Tell us a little bit about your background and did this kind of whole world above SEO started for you.

[00:06:29] Mitch: Yeah, absolutely. SEO. I feel is in my DNA, but it actually didn't start until college. So this is roughly 15 years ago. I was sitting in class after class. Studying marketing, but still studying the billboards and radio ads and stuff like that. It was very outdated inside the classroom. And so I started at nights and weekends building websites and really just learning SEO.

[00:06:56] So then I really enjoyed that and I ended up being able to actually get a few customers out of my dorm room, doing SEO for them, and just really enjoyed that even more than just doing it for my own website. And so from there, when I graduated, I actually landed in an SEO-specific agency. I lucked out, there was one in my hometown Indianapolis that I was actually, I had some really great traction.

[00:07:22] Some of my customers, there were like FedEx and Sears and Kmart, EA Sports, all sorts of folks that are really name brand. And so I was able to learn so much there and out of different scale. Then from there, I actually went in-house and was at a $400 million company here also in Indianapolis there, they were an ADT reseller so home security services. And I had the, I was lucky enough to manage their team of SEO experts in that company. And I had a really great time there as well.

[00:07:58] But after about a year of that, I had a buddy of mine who was employee number two at a company called Lessonly. And he called me up and said, Hey, we need someone to run marketing. Do you want to do it? And I said, yes. So I joined as an employee, number three at Lessonly. And I spent the next five years actually trying to get out of SEO over that time. I was like, my, my entire background is around SEO. I want to diversify what I do and how I do it. And I did, but over time came to realize the number one channel for us there at that company.

[00:08:32] And the number one channel that helped us scale and grow over the long run was organic search. And so I started really thinking about codifying that and thinking of how could I help other SaaS companies actually do this as well. So that is a, that was really the way that the idea came about was I think in that there's a lot of other folks that could be learning from the things that I've learned, and that was thinking, how can I help more folks?

[00:09:00] And so it made sense for me to actually leave and start Demandwell, early 20, 19.

[00:09:07] And when you started, you had no intention to build a software product, right? Correct. It was just

[00:09:12] going to be an agency. Yeah, exactly.

[00:09:15] And then at what point did you realize that you should be moving into a software business?

[00:09:22] Yeah,

[00:09:23] so it was about 18 months of just being me and just being services over that time, I built a bunch of spreadsheets. My customers to be really efficient and grow faster and better than they could otherwise. But that combination of humans plus spreadsheets really has limitations. There's only so many.

[00:09:48] You can go with that combination. And I just kept hitting that wall with my customers where I could see the potential, but we were starting to stall out on some of the, and so I said, you know what? I know that the way that we scale this wall is by adding software into the mix. And so yeah, went out and pitched a local venture firm here called high alpha was also behind blessedly.

[00:10:15] And a lot of folks there and talked with them through that same problem and they agreed. And so we decided to partner together and restart demand well as a software company.

[00:10:25] Omer: Okay, great. So I want to talk a little bit about that, that the decision to build an SEO tool before we do that, just give people a sense of the size of the business in terms of revenue, team size, number of customers.

[00:10:40] Mitch: Yeah, for sure. Last July, it was just about 150 K in revenue and full of customers. Today we are 16 people strong. We are over a million in revenue and we have, I think we're approaching 60 customers at the moment.

[00:10:59] Omer: So there's been like a lot of growth for you over the last 12 to 14 months, I'd say. And we're definitely going to dig into that, but this isn't five or 10 years ago. This was very recently. Why did you believe the world needed another SEO tool? There's no shortage of them out there. Why did you believe that you needed to build something and more importantly, why you believe. You could build a business around it.

[00:11:29] Mitch: Yeah. Yeah. That's a great question. Sometimes I questioned my sanity there, but in reality, there's no shortage of software companies in the SEO space.

[00:11:40] There's also no shortage of agencies from the SEO and if you are really primarily if you're an in-house marketer and you need help with SEO, those are your only two options you're going to have. You're going to, you're going to talk to some agencies. They're going to talk to some software companies, but at the end of the day, I believe that neither of those two can provide what someone needs in entirety.

[00:12:07] The idea was well, what if we took the best parts of both of those and combined them together, and that is what we've done. And we call it a people plus platform approach where every customer of ours is getting a human personal touch from a consultant that has 10 plus years experience doing SEO and has also been a director of marketing in a SaaS company.

[00:12:33] We have three folks on the team that are like that, but then they're also going to get access to our platform, which has a number of features. But at a high level is essentially the place that our consultants and our customers go to interact and coach and the platform at the highest level helps you understand where you are, where you could be.

[00:12:55] Helps you put together a game plan of how to bridge the gap also helps you facilitate some of the production work that needs to occur during that. And then once all that is done, it also has a reporting and insights feature as well to help you understand if there is an ROI or not. And so if we take a look at those two components agencies in the past can be, can provide a really bespoke survey, they can't scale. That's what I was experiencing before we had software.

[00:13:22] On the other hand, you've got software companies that can scale almost infinitely because they're not providing any kind of bespoke nature to the experience. And so it's by combining the idea of how do we create an experience that is specific to each customer, but also.

[00:13:40] Scaled to a lot more customers than we could then we could do otherwise. So that's the main reason that in the space, there were only two options. We've now provided a third option. The other big kind of talking point there is, I've used almost every platform out there in this space, in the SEO space.

[00:13:59] And I have never been satisfied with the recommendations that they provide or the priority that they put on things or the idea that you know, that essentially that they don't really listen to you. There's not a way it's not a two-way communication. It's often just one-way communication. And so what you end up doing is just ignoring everything that they tell you over time.

[00:14:19] And after about a year of doing that, you're probably ready to move on. We have baked in what we, from a priority perspective, we've baked into our platform, different things that not everyone pays attention to in the SEO space, but we've found to be incredibly successful and we've created a different prioritization than what other folks had done in the past.

[00:14:40] Omer: And so an agency will typically go and do the work for you with your model. And they use it to coaching. Is it more about providing support guidance, expertise to your customers or does your team actually go and do some of the work for customers as well?

[00:15:03] Mitch: So we do have some packages that actually allow us to create content for customers.

[00:15:10] So we do some of that, but the Genesis of the idea and the primary intent of the idea of this software is to enable someone that is inside of a SaaS company inside the marketing team and give them the SEO experience that we all have without having to take. Along the way. And sometimes the way that we talk about that dual approach with people on platform is that we want our customers to be in an analogy.

[00:15:37] We want our customers to be the pro golfer, but we want our consultants to be the caddy and we want our platform to be the clubs. And so we are providing the guidance and the tools, but it requires the pro golfer to actually use both of those to be.

[00:15:55] Omer: Nice analogy like it. Okay. Let's talk a little bit about how you built the product.

[00:16:02] So you're not a developer, correct? So this was a new area for you to go and get a product built. And you've also, you mentioned you've used every product SEO kind of product out there. Some are very good. Some are not. But they'd be working. Most of them be working on those for years. So probably when you look at that and do the comparison in terms of feature parity is probably at the outset, a pretty big mountain to climb.

[00:16:34] Sure. So one, how did you figure out what type of product you were initially going to build? And two, how did you get it built?

[00:16:46] Mitch: Absolutely. It was a fun side effect of being services only for a while is those spreadsheets. So each of those spreadsheets I made, I think I had a total of less standardized spreadsheets that each had a standard operating procedure of how to use it and how to scale.

[00:17:03] I didn't have 11 when I started, I had a one and then two and over time the customers I had as a services agency informed me about what their key problems were along the way. And I would essentially create a spreadsheet for it to solve each of those. So it was a market product, a market validation exercise, which was not the intent at all, but it turned out that way.

[00:17:28] So when it came to actually create our software, we actually knew a lot of what our customer base already wanted and the problems that they were trying to solve. It was primarily a matter of choosing which ones to solve first. And I think one of the biggest lessons I've learned from my CTO and co-founder Sam Smith, he did not co-found the original agency, but we said, let's say I founded the agency, but we founded the software company because that was absolutely the case.

[00:17:58] I had to bring someone in who did know how to do this stuff. And he's been in, he's been creating a MarTech for a decade. And so what I've learned so much from him is this idea that you need to take whatever that grandiose idea is, break it down into what is truly critical at any given moment, and progress over time.

[00:18:20] And while my patients didn't like that it has proven to be just an absolutely incredibly powerful way of thinking about things that really challenged me. And to realize, like you mentioned the feature parody across the competitors, the reality is we don't need a lot of the features that day offer in order to generate success.

[00:18:43] A lot of the things we were doing were just with, and so we were able to really pare down what was creating success for our customers, focus there first, and then expand beyond that.

[00:18:54] Omer: And so weighted, did those insights come from, was that just from. The spreadsheets and of the experience of having run the agency for a while?

[00:19:03] Mitch: Yeah. I think it is an evaluation of a handful of things, but one was just asking the questions of why are we doing that? Why do we need to do that? And doing that really annoying exercise of asking why like seven times for each thing. And then that was really revealing in the early days that a lot of things pointed to certain features that were more important than others. And the other aspect of it is we just simply

[00:19:32] evaluated how much time each of these recurring tasks would require from either our consultants or from our customers. And that allowed us to cross against the other analysis to understand if there's something that seems very important and is taking a ton of time.

[00:19:51] What if we could reduce that time in half or by 10 X, if we could do that and achieve that important thing with such little time, that's probably a good idea. So that's the initial approach at least of how we took it.

[00:20:04] Omer: How long did it take to get Sam that first product built and in the hands of customers?

[00:20:09] Mitch: Yeah, so we, so he joined, I believe early. And we had our first MVP in customers' hands by December 18th of 2020.

[00:20:22] Omer: Like the specificity of that date it was very nice.

[00:20:25] Mitch: It was a very special day.

[00:20:27] Omer: Why was it so special?

[00:20:28] Mitch: It was special because it was the first step of a dream come true. But when you can think of what something could be. And you can think of, you can see the growth and some of them are customers that are just absolute rock stars in there could be viewed as rock stars in the company. We can see that if we could do that for thousands of marketers, that would just be amazing. That would be a special mark left on the world.

[00:20:52] And the way that we're going to do that is through software. So just having that first experience, sharing that with customers and the resounding the great feedback we heard from that. Yeah, it was really the first step of a vision or a dream.

[00:21:07] Omer: I know that going from zero to the first $150K in revenue, you told me earlier was all through referrals. What was that 150K before you built the product or was that as a result of building the product?

[00:21:25] Mitch: Yeah, that was before. So that was actually when I went through the investment pitch that was essentially the current revenue at that time.

[00:21:34] Omer: So you were roughly around that point when the product launched, let's talk about the last year or so, and what you've done to, to grow this business from $150K to over a million ARR. I know initially, you were doing a lot of the selling, so maybe we can start.

[00:21:55] Mitch: Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. So there were definitely a founder selling phase for us, which I actually enjoyed for quite a bit. There were varying levels of stress during that. Definitely enjoyed that time, but it really was still primarily referral for us.

[00:22:11] It was whether that was a referral. I personal network or referral from customers seeing great success or referrals from our investors as well. It's still continued to be primarily referral-driven. And

[00:22:23] and so that was something I had always heard of kind of startup companies doing right and saying, Hey, we're about to create this thing. Do you want to pay for it now, even though you got to wait for a while and it was just, it was an overwhelmingly good feeling to hear that there were a number of folks that were willing to purchase a future product without it actually even being in existence that gave me a ton of confidence during that founder phase.

[00:22:49] Omer: Okay. Great. Let's talk a little bit about that because the people who are pre-selling most of these people were warm leads, right? Yes. So there was at least some kind of connection or some kind of mutual existing relationship, which helped you have some more credibility as you, you talk to these people. What was your pitch? What did you tell these people that made them want to get out their credit card literally, or figuratively commit to paying you before the product was ready?

[00:23:23] Mitch: Yeah. Yeah, for sure. And these were mostly referrals, but at this stage, there were a few that I knew personally, most of our folks that were new to me, but are referred in from someone.

[00:23:33] So it was warm but not as warm as some of the first 10 customers or whatever, but I love the question of what were we selling. And it's actually pretty similar to what we're selling today because wow. We think it's incredibly important that we're doing this person plus platform approach.

[00:23:52] Lot of customers don't care. They just want a result. They want to grow revenue from organic search in an exponential way, in the fastest way possible. And so that's really why we focus on selling both then. And now we focus on that problem that we talked about earlier because it really resonates with folks. A lot of people are creating content that is absolutely not performing how they want to do. And so we really focused in on that, just that proven results of increased SEO performance all the way through to we've got some great stats around ROI and with selling towards you have a problem. We can fix that problem for you. They didn't necessarily care.

[00:24:40] Back in the day that they had to wait for the platform because we were able to actually service their need with spreadsheets. And they were totally, we were totally transparent about that. And we can do all the same things that we're going to be able to do. Just going to be at a smaller scale because it's all spreadsheets.

[00:24:54] Yeah. That's how we were able to work around that.

[00:24:58] Omer: It's a really good point you made there. It was like you, weren't just selling vaporware and telling them that we'll be back in six months with something you find a way to start helping you. Right away. And sometimes I think we give spreadsheets less credit than sometimes.

[00:25:17] Okay, great. And then I know Yom that you hired an SDR and just tell me a little bit about what you did there and how that helped you to grow the business faster.

[00:25:28] Mitch: We had to outsource freelance SDR. And it allowed me to spend less time thinking about how are we going to get business and more time thinking about and refining, how do we convert attention into revenue. And I think that's the biggest way that it helped. Could I have gone out or could I maybe have had a similar sale tracking down the next referral and constantly networking and things like that? Yeah. Maybe it could have had the same amount but would have taken a lot of time to attract that new attention.

[00:26:04] Whereas having SDR do it allowed me to shift my mind one step lower in the funnel to understand what's scalable. That will resonate with everyone so that when we hire our account executives, which was the next phase that I would be able to enable them to sell on something that we knew worked rather than saying, Hey, account execs, you need to figure this out.

[00:26:28] Okay.

[00:26:29] Omer: When you hired this first SDR, was this a full-time person and also like, how are you paying them? What were you? Was it commission-based it's a mixture.

[00:26:37] Mitch: Yeah, it was definitely not a full-time position. And had a monthly rate we had agreed to, and a certain number of outreach activities that we had agreed to.

[00:26:48] Omer: The role of this person was basically to help you find leads. Yes. Okay. And then once you hired, like how long were you doing. Until you also brought up the day or to the team.

[00:27:02] Mitch: So from the time we started doing that, it was really only, probably a few months before we actually brought on our first two account executives. And then as soon as they started, they really took a lot of self-sourcing opportunities on their plate. And that was a really key, it had a really key impact for us on that next phase was them tapping their own personal networks and doing their own outbound outreach in order to drum up new business, that was really effective for us.

[00:27:35] Omer: So you started off doing founder-led sales, like doing it all yourself, and then slowly you built out a small sales team, as you figured stuff out, rather than hiring salespeople to figure that stuff out. Important distinction. I know LinkedIn ads have also been working for you and most people will say LinkedIn ads are expensive. They don't convert. Partly they work for you because of. The price point of your product. Can you give us a range of typically where that sits?

[00:28:10] Mitch: Yes. So we have a few kinds of standard packages on the low end is in the 20K mark. The high-end is a 100K that's a more enterprise kind of turnkey package, but our most popular in most purchases, just under 30K.

[00:28:23] Omer: So the average contract value here is large enough for you to be able to play in a place like LinkedIn advertising where somebody is selling a $50 a month product is really going to struggle to make LinkedIn ads work. Why do you think you've had success with LinkedIn ads? And can you just give us an overview of what does that funnel looks like, that you just running direct ads, promoting DemandWell, and getting people to go to a demo. Are you use starting off promoting content and retargeting people were like, what's like the basic setup that worked for you there.

[00:29:00] Mitch: Yeah. Yeah. We have a bit spread across all those things. We've got some ads that are pretty low funnel, so sharing a case, study videos, or just straight up asking for a demo, that kind of thing.

[00:29:13] And then we also do have some higher funnel campaigns. We actually have an SEO kind of education email course. That is a six-day experience that when folks fill that out, they get an email for. And learn a bunch of stuff from, so that's pretty high funnel but actually because we're baking in the recurring intention, there that's actually converted pretty well for us.

[00:29:36] Overall I think the biggest reason for success there is because it's one of the few places that we can really narrow down the targeting to the SaaS audience. So because we're focused really exclusively on that audience, we are able to have an incredibly high percentage of MQL compared to total leads. It's near a hundred percent.

[00:29:59] It's not quite there, but we from LinkedIn in particular, it's almost exactly the right type of person at the right type of company. Every time we get someone from LinkedIn.

[00:30:09] Omer: So is there anything else that, that we haven't covered that was a significant driver in helping you get to that first million?

[00:30:17] Mitch: Yeah, I think the biggest thing is advisors. We have had just tremendous success having advisors that we really respect and really appreciate. And when we apply what they say, it actually works. Whether that's our investors at High Alpha or independent advisors, we have from various other SaaS company around is that we've connected with.

[00:30:42] I think the biggest thing is having a perspective from someone who's been there, done that to help you see around corners, make better decisions, all that stuff. I think that is absolutely the number one reason why we've been as successful as we have been and why we will continue to grow at a pretty substantial rate it's because we're listening a lot and asking a ton of questions all the time.

[00:31:07] Omer: So you've been running this business now for nearly three years, what's been the hardest part of building this business so far?

[00:31:16] Mitch: Yeah. I'm a relatively emotional person in general. Good and bad. But I think, yeah, one of the most challenging parts is definitely the emotional side. Having to be the one that is both setting goals, as well as pushing to achieve those goals across the whole organization.

[00:31:35] It's a lot it's definitely something that I am enjoying more and more is the challenge of that. In dealing with those emotions that occur. But overall, yeah, that, that is that can be taxing at times. And I think there's seasons where it's pretty rough and there's other seasons where it's really great and it's not dependent upon the success of the business or not.

[00:31:58] It's just. And I think what I'm finding is the greatest correlation to my mental health is the level of context switching. Like the less context switching you are required to do in a day typically allows your brain to process things better. So that's one thing that I'm personally working on is reducing the sheer quantity of things as much as I can to focus on what is truly most important.

[00:32:24] Omer: How do you do that? Because I think you take on the role of founder and CEO and you have a lot of things to think about. You have a lot of plates spinning at the same time. And as you've started to build a team that like 16 people now, that obviously help, but at the end of the day, the buck stops with you.

[00:32:45] And you're the guy who has to make sure that everything across the board is working. And so what are some tactics that you use? I know some people use like day partying and they'll talk about, okay, one day, I'm going to just focus on whatever. And maybe that's related to what you said about the context switching, but what have you done to find more sanity.

[00:33:09] Mitch: Yeah, one, I'll say two things that there, they have one thing in common, which is just writing things down. And then I think whether you're doing that physically or on the computer, I think it's just for me and my personal mental health, that is just so important for me to get things out of my head and on paper.

[00:33:28] And so there are two ways that I really like to do that. One is just in general, writing down the truly the list of all the things that you've got on your mind. And often even just doing that, I think can be incredibly helpful and help you understand that's the scope. That's not smaller, but it's also not larger than that, which can be encouraging.

[00:33:50] But within that framework, you can take things, move them up and down on the list until you've gotten your top two, three, four that you need to focus on and then call those some people use like the big rocks analogy, but use those for your next week or whatever. The other thing that's also, I'm writing down a similar but slightly different is I do this very regimented every single Friday I have a, what I call it, my stress list. And I literally write down a list of the things that are stressing me out. Cause some things can be on your mind, but not stressing you out. But what are those things that you're just ruminating on? That's just filling up your brain and that have a negative spin.

[00:34:31] And again, just having those down on the list is really helpful to know that it's not larger, but it also, for me, I know that every week I'm going to experience and I'm going to overtime and I do this to be able to look back at what was stressing me out a couple of weeks ago and see, oh, that wasn't on my list this week.

[00:34:51] And it helps encourage me that wow. If I focus on something, if I deem it a priority and I focus on it, I can actually have an impact on things. It helps me feel less like a victim of a circumstance and more whether it's an illusion or not, I'm more in control of what's going on. .

[00:35:09] Omer: Yeah I think there's a, just, there's a magic and just writing stuff down. And I wrote something the other day about morning pages and this idea of just journaling and just getting stuff out of your head. And I think it's amazing sometimes even things that you, stressing you out just by writing them down. You don't fix anything, but you feel better once you've done that.

[00:35:28] It's I'll take that. All right. Okay. Good. Thank you for sharing that. Let's wrap up. Let's go into the lightning round. We've got seven quickfire questions for you.

[00:35:38] What's the best piece of business advice you've ever received?

[00:35:41] Mitch: I think it's actually another kind of quote I'm going to butcher this quote, but I think it's important is that success is dressed up in, I think it, I think the quote is “Success is dressed up in overalls and looks like a lot of hard work” or something like that.

[00:35:57] Omer: Trying to look up the quote so we can make it better. It's pro oh, here we go. Opportunity is missed by most people because it's dressed in overalls and looks like work.

[00:36:06] Mitch: Yes, always remember that perseverance, discipline, and just action is what's required.

[00:36:13] Omer: Right we nailed it. What book would you recommend to our audience and why?

[00:36:17] Mitch: I can't really narrow it down to one, but I would say just anything from Malcolm Gladwell, that's probably a cheesy answer, but I am just always inspired by the way, he thinks about things. And because I love listening to things that are not about business because I think you learn so much that you can apply in unique ways to business.

[00:36:37] Omer: What's one attribute or characteristic in your mind of a successful founder?

[00:36:41] Mitch: Perseverance.

[00:36:42] Omer: What's your favorite personal productivity tool or habit?

[00:36:45] Mitch: Already talked about with writing things down, but I do actually every single week also create a quote-unquote big rocks list. That's typically between four to 10 at the absolute max. Things that I'm going to get done that week.

[00:37:00] Omer: What's a new, crazy business idea you'd love to pursue if you had the extra time?

[00:37:03] Mitch: So I don't know that this counts, but I'll share my, one of my dreams. If I find that ever able to retire early, I want to be an intern for 50 different dirty jobs, like over the course of a year. So I'd love to work in like a sewage plant to, I don't know, poultry farm or wherever I think it just be really cool to get a first-person perspective on a lot of that stuff.

[00:37:29] Omer: What a crazy idea. I've just never had that. No one has ever said anything like that before.

[00:37:37] Mitch: Early in my career of when I was like 15 and barely had a work permit, I was, I did a lot of dishwashing, and I still, to this day, some of the best things that I learned about people about business, about life happens in some of those just grimy jobs.

[00:37:52] I don't know what it is about them, but I think that's part of the reason why I want to do it again.

[00:37:58] Omer: Yeah, love it. All right. What's an interesting fun fact about you that most people don't know..

[00:38:01] Mitch: One is, so my full name is Mitchell Fairbanks Causey, and I always get the number of greats wrong here, but my great grandfather, I think I'm missing a great there, but anyway, his name was Charles Warren Fairbanks and he was actually Teddy Roosevelt's vice-president.

[00:38:19] Omer: Wow. Yeah.

[00:38:21] Mitch: So I'm looking after him. And so as a Fairbanks Alaska.

[00:38:24] Omer: That is a very interesting fact. And then finally, what's one of your most important passions outside of your work?

[00:38:31] Mitch: Yeah. Number one, definitely family. I've got a wife, two boys, and another baby on the way, actually, but outside of that, I love being on two wheels.

[00:38:42] Whether that's road cycling, mountain biking, or dirt biking, I don't know what it is. Two wheels. That's my passion.

[00:38:50] Omer: Love it. All right. Great. Mitch, thank you so much for joining me and sharing your story, and congratulations on turning an agency business into a SaaS business. I know many people running agencies want to do that and you provided hopefully some inspiration. So people that are in may be in that situation. And it also is great to talk about what you've done over the last year or so to hit seven figures.

[00:39:15] And that might give some people listening, some ideas on how they might be able to accelerate their growth. If people want to find out more about DemandWell, they can go to demandwell.com. And if folks want to get in touch with you, what's the best way for them to do that?

[00:39:33] Mitch: Yeah, absolutely. Happy to share my email just mitch [at] demandwell [dot] com.

[00:39:38] Omer: Awesome. Thank you so much. I wish you and the team the best of success and thanks again for joining me today.

[00:39:45] Mitch: Oh my goodness. Thank you, Omer. Wonderful talking with you.

[00:39:48] Omer: Cheers.