3 SaaS Pivots, a Cease and Desist, and $5M ARR

Omer (00:16.320)
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 talked to Max Kolish, the co founder of Zynq IO, an e commerce lab that builds products to help Amazon and ebay sellers.
Every SaaS founder knows that finding product market fit is really tough.
You might have to pivot your SaaS business multiple times before you find the right product for the right market.
So what can we learn from SaaS founders who failed repeatedly before they found success?
When Max and Doug were students at mit, they talked about building a software product to help ebay sellers, and eventually they both dropped out of college to start their business.
They got accepted into yc, but pretty soon realized that their idea wasn't that great after all.
So within a few weeks, they pivoted and built a product that saved people money when buying on Amazon.
They got some good traction and it looked like they were on their way to finding product market fit.
But that all changed when they received a cease and desist letter from Amazon.
So they were back to square one again.
They needed another idea.
One day they received an email out of the blue from an ex customer who told them that he wanted to use an API but wasn't technical, and he asked them if they could help him out.
That email led to Max and Doug pivoting again and creating a new product.
But this time it wasn't just an idea they'd come up with themselves.
It was something a real customer needed.
And the product resonated with the market this time and helped them to get traction.
Today, their company generates over $5 million in annual recurring revenue.
It's a great story about persistence, flexibility, listening to your customers, and how to successfully pivot your SaaS business.
So I hope you enjoy it.
Max, welcome to the show.

Max Kolysh (02:13.870)
Good to be here.
Thanks, Amar.

Omer (02:16.270)
So I like to ask my guests if they have a favorite quote, something that inspires or motivates them.
Do you have one?
Or maybe just tell us in your own words what gets you out of bed every day.

Max Kolysh (02:26.650)
I have a lot of favorite quotes, but I like, Embrace the Struggle is one that I've repeated to myself a bunch of times and basically just touches on the fact that you have to wake up every day trying to fight a lot of different forces as a startup founder.
And if you embrace it, it's a lot of fun.

Omer (02:42.330)
Yeah, that's a Good reminder for any entrepreneur.

Max Kolysh (02:44.810)
Exactly.

Omer (02:46.090)
Great.
So tell us about Zync, like what is the product or products in this case, who's it for and what problem are you trying to solve?

Max Kolysh (02:53.280)
Yeah, so Zynq, we're about five years old.
We started.
I'll kind of tell you a little bit about the origin story of the company.
Me and my co founder met back in college at MIT and then he was working on a couple different ideas.
He was basically actually doing dropship arbitrage, but he was in high school and he was trying to productize some of that software that he built into a software as a service company.
And basically I was kind of working with him.
I was doing my master's and I was bored of the master's and so we decided to apply to YC with some of the stuff we were working on.
Got into YC kind of really floundered and didn't really know what we were doing in startup accelerator.
Didn't have a lot of success with what we were working on at the time.
Pivoted halfway through YC into a consumer product because we just wanted to get a lot of traction for demo day.
And so we had in six weeks we built a brand new product that basically helped consumers shop online and helped them save money automatically.
That was called Zync Save.
And we ended up raising money around that had some traction for it, you know, it was doing pretty well.
And then got a cease and desist from Amazon.
And then after that we basically spent another six months trying to figure out what we were actually building.
And after that we kind of landed on what we're doing today.
And so what we're doing today is Zynk is basically a holdings company.
We have a several different products, two of which are SaaS and one of which is an enterprise product.
And so the SaaS products are price Yak, which is a dropship arbitrage power seller tool, and Joe Lister which is a cross listing tool for Amazon to ebay sellers.
So I'll be talking a bit about those as well.
And we also have an enterprise software arm where we basically expose our underlying APIs to larger companies.

Omer (04:37.220)
Got it.
Great.
So let's go back to the MIT days and how did you come up with the idea for this business?

Max Kolysh (04:43.620)
Yeah, so my co founder used to do drop shipping in high school.
And for those that aren't familiar, basically dropship arbitrage.
What it entails is finding things that are sold on one website cheaper than they're sold on another website.
And then when somebody Makes a purchase, you basically list the thing on the place where it's more expensive, undercut the best seller there.
And then when somebody makes a purchase, you just order it from the lower price website and it's pretty straightforward.
And it's kind of an easy way to get into E commerce.
A lot of people, a lot of companies focus on the kind of price saving extensions tools to help shoppers.
But actually it's the sellers that have more incentive to find these, these savings because then they can drive a lot of traffic to their sales and they can, instead of just buying it once, they can sell it 100 times.
And so as a seller you kind of can do this.
And it's kind of like market making for the physical goods world.
So my co founder used to do this in high school and one of the coolest things that kind of came about from that was an API to buy anything online and particularly from Amazon.
So Amazon and really no other retailers have an API for making purchases.
And we needed one and so we built one and we thought, hey, maybe this isn't just useful for dropshippers, this could be useful for a lot of other business types.
And so that was kind of the idea that we applied to IC with was, hey, let's build the kind of ordering infrastructure for the future and create these APIs to place orders instantaneously without actually going to the website.
So your fridge can order things automatically when, when it runs out of groceries or your bathroom can order more toilet paper, whatever it might be.
That was kind of the idea.

Omer (06:14.800)
Got it.
Okay.
So you see this opportunity for building a product around dropship arbitrage, which I think on its own is a really interesting business that you can kind of like, you see, you can get into E commerce and have basically no inventory, no kind of, you know, I don't know, it's just, it's a really interesting kind of model, but maybe that's a different conversation for another day.
So you see this opportunity there to build a product.
What did you do next?

Max Kolysh (06:42.430)
Yeah, so the way we actually got into that was, you know, we kind of didn't think that the dropshipping was actually a huge opportunity initially.
And so we said, hey, let's sell this to enterprises, let's do this consumer chrome extension, etc.
So we tried to actually a bunch of different things.
And then about a year into the company we had another customer who was actually interested in doing the drop shipping and they contacted us about using our API directly and they said, hey, you know, I'm not Technical I want to integrate this API, but I want to use it for my drop shipping.
And then we said, hey, actually, you know, Doug used to do this way back when.
And so we built a kind of lightweight version for this customer of this product, which consisted of, you know, tying into their ebay account, tying into their Amazon account, and automatically tracking things when they sell and making the purchase.
And that's what ultimately evolved into price yak.
And so the way we kind of stumbled into that was getting interest from a customer for a tangential product that we had, which was this API.
So luckily that early customer was like, hey, we'll pay you.
They set up the specs, they were like, we'll pay you a few thousand dollars a month.
And we said, hey, you know, we don't have any other really good ideas right now, so let's go with this guy.
And then we just got more and more interest for that product.

Omer (07:49.350)
You went through a number of pivots to get to where you are today.
What was the original idea that you started with?

Max Kolysh (07:54.770)
Yeah, the very original idea was basically using this ordering API that we built to allow publishers to create on site shopping carts.
So that was another part of the kind of our YC pitch was publishers, which are like generally bloggers or these affiliate marketers or whoever their business is through affiliate.
So they have links that they link off to the retailers with.
And then when the consumer makes a sale, the publisher actually gets a cut of that.
Right.
Some affiliate commission, 4 to 15%.
Typically, the biggest problem with that is that the publisher actually loses the customer.
Right.
So you, you know, you click away and all of a sudden you are on a different website and it's kind of confusing and there's a lot of drop off and also the publisher that can't, you know, sell you other products.
So the idea was you as a publisher, a blogger, whoever, can actually create a shopping cart that would work across multiple websites.
And so you could add stuff, you know, you could buy a whole outfit with the shirt from Macy's and the pants from Nordstrom and etc.
Etc.
And then you could just place one order and we would split it up on the back end.
The customer would stay on your site as the publisher and you would get the affiliate commission and keep the customer on your website.
So that was kind of the idea and there was some interest in it for sure.
The market was a little bit smaller than we expected.
So there's a lot of challenges in that, which I can go into as well.

Omer (09:10.460)
Okay, so you start with that idea.
And that's the idea you used to get into yc.

Max Kolysh (09:17.660)
Correct.

Omer (09:18.380)
And then at some point, getting up to, you mentioned this earlier about demo day, you pivoted and picked another idea.
So, number one, like, what was that next idea and why did you change so quickly?

Max Kolysh (09:34.780)
Yeah, so the next idea was the Zync Save browser extension for helping consumers save money.
The reason we pivoted halfway through YC was because we were basically trying to close this one big enterprise deal with a very large affiliate marketer and it wasn't moving.
You know, it was clear that it wasn't going to happen anytime soon, let alone in time for demo day, so that we can say, hey, we have this big flagship customer.
And so we had to make a decision of, you know, let's move on and let's just try to get something with a lot of growth in time for demo day.
That was the decision.

Omer (10:06.220)
Okay, so you're now currently with the Zync Safe browser extension.
And how long did you guys work on that idea before you pivoted again?

Max Kolysh (10:16.520)
So that was a few months.
We got about 25,000 users in just six weeks.
We basically built it in two weeks, did growth for launch on TechCrunch, launched it in a bunch of places and got like 25,000 users.
And it was working really well, actually, until I should mention, we fundraised on that.
We raised some money around that idea.
And then a few weeks after we were done fundraising, we got a cease and desist letter from Amazon, basically saying that we shouldn't allow, you know, we can't do this because it violates some sort of privacy between them and the end consumer, which realistically wasn't a real thing, wasn't a real problem.
But for us, we were kind of, you know, small and we knew we would never beat them in court or anything like that.
So we just kind of moved on from that idea.

Omer (10:58.190)
Okay, so you raised around 400,000 at that point for this idea?

Max Kolysh (11:03.070)
Yes.

Omer (11:03.790)
Okay, and tell me a little bit about, like, what did Zync Save actually do?
Like, how did it work?

Max Kolysh (11:08.350)
Yeah, so Zyn Save was super cool.
The way it would work is it was a browser plugin that you would install.
You would kind of forget about it.
And then when you were shopping on Amazon, right at the last page of checkout, right below the place order button, you would see another button that would say, buy with Zig Save for some price that's 5 to 10% off.
And if you click that button, we basically take all the data from that page, open a new page on our website and it would offer the same product to you at a reduced price.
And so you could buy it from us in real time with the better price.
And the idea there is, there's so many ways to get savings on things, but people don't want to go through the hassle of using the correct credit card, using the right ebates or whatever rewards program.
We'll just do it for you.
We're just going to consolidate that all.
And so we were actually able to run out of a break even.
But I think the real reason that Amazon ultimately sent us a cease and desist was that they kind of obviously want to be seen as the best price.
So if there's a service that's offering a consistently better price, no matter how they're doing it, it doesn't look good for Amazon.
So that's the reasoning, I think, for the seasoned assist.

Omer (12:09.030)
So when you gave them the saving, were they buying from somewhere else or were they still ending up buying from Amazon but you were just finding better savings for them?

Max Kolysh (12:17.670)
So both we would be the merchant of record.
So we would charge their credit card, they would, the purchase would happen with us.
But we were fulfilling from oftentimes it was just Amazon the same, the same Amazon seller, we would just have, you know, different credit cards or we were doing discounted gift cards, all sorts of stuff that you could kind of do to get savings.
Oftentimes we were also buying it from a different retailer.
That was the real cool part, is that, you know, oftentimes Amazon isn't the best price.
And so we would go and we would programmatically find better prices elsewhere.
And then if they matched, you know, the same shipping speed and all that, we would actually just buy it there.
And so this was a, I think it was, you know, really cool idea because at the end of the day, you know, Amazon wants you to believe they have the best price.
Every store wants you to believe they have the best price.
But it's very rare that you can't be the best price and also be making money consistently.
So we were losing money on some orders, but making money on others.

Omer (13:04.140)
So funnily enough, getting the cease and desist at this point is kind of good and bad.
Right, because it's bad because nobody wants to get a cease and desist, especially from a company like Amazon.
But I guess it's good because it showed that you were doing something or getting enough traction that they were paying attention to it.

Max Kolysh (13:23.000)
Yep, exactly.
We were definitely, you know, we had Definitely gotten their attention.
And it kind of was cool.
We were always thinking about using it as publicity, but at the same time, we never got around to it.
So kind of faded off the.
Off the map.

Omer (13:36.440)
Okay, so what did you guys decide to do?
Like you said, you mentioned earlier, like, okay, it didn't seem like it was worth trying to fight this against Amazon.
So what, so what was the thinking process you went through?
And then what did sort of the next pivot look like?

Max Kolysh (13:54.850)
So after that, we spent a couple of months, four to five months, kind of figuring things out.
And it wasn't an explicit pivot, but we tried a couple of things.
We tried our own storefront, we tried our.
We tried a bunch of different ideas.
We were, you know, lucky enough that we, we had just graduated.
We were, you know, we had some money in the bank from the fundraise, and so we kind of had some time to just sit back and think about things and try a bunch of different ideas.
And it's fun.
You know, we're both, me and my co founder are both software engineers.
We were both just coding most of the time, and so we were just trying a bunch of different stuff.
And the next thing that we kind of figured out was what I mentioned earlier was where we had a customer who was actually willing to pay some money for us to develop a product for them.

Omer (14:30.630)
Okay.
Okay, got it.
Yeah.
So tell me a little bit more about that.
Like, how did that person turn up?
Like, was it just out of the blue?

Max Kolysh (14:37.190)
Yeah, well, we were publicizing the API and we were saying, hey, order anything on the Internet.
And then some of this person reached out and said, hey, like, I would love to use this API, but I don't know how to code.
And so that was, you know, we got it through inbound for our initial product.

Omer (14:49.720)
Okay.
Yeah, I mean, just walk me through the process in terms of like, okay, it's great to have somebody who's asking for this, but how do you sort of, how do you decide whether this is a product opportunity or something that you're just doing as a kind of a consulting gig, as a one off and building it for somebody and nobody else necessarily needs the same solution.

Max Kolysh (15:10.040)
Totally.
So initially we did think it would be a one off thing.
And then we actually outsourced the engineering work to a friend of ours who is now actually our cto.
But in hindsight, he was just kind of a friend that was doing some consulting work for us.
And what happened was we kept getting more and more customer demand for this that we basically Just said, okay, hey, we got to bring this in house.
And once we had more than just a few people using it, we said, okay, we should focus on this for real, build it into a full fledged product.

Omer (15:33.790)
Okay, and what did that product look like?
Is that basically what was that sort of like the first version of, of what is now Price Yak?

Max Kolysh (15:42.650)
That's right.
Exactly right.

Omer (15:44.970)
Okay, so you built the product, you've got one customer, the product comes together.
Let's talk a little bit about, like, growth, like, how do you get the second customer or the 10th customer?

Max Kolysh (15:54.570)
Yeah.
So with Price Yak, it was.
We had a bunch of different tactics.
A lot of it was figuring out who is dropshipping.
And we basically developed our own methodology for figuring out who on the Internet was a drop shipper.
Right.
So based on looking at a seller, looking at what they're selling, things like that, obviously proprietary, we could figure out who's a drop shipper.
And then it was just a matter of getting in touch with them.
And usually it was a pretty easy sale once we did get in touch with them because we're like, hey, you know, you're probably, you probably have people that you're hiring that are doing all this manual work, or you're fulfilling the orders yourself, or you probably have a lot of issues with whatever software you were using, because we knew ours was, was a lot better.
And so that's kind of how that came about.

Omer (16:32.490)
So I was looking at the PriceCheck homepage earlier and I couldn't kind of figure out the pricing.
It just, I mean, I just saw something which just said, like, totally free until April.
Yeah, but like, how are you monetizing that?

Max Kolysh (16:45.010)
Well, it's free for a certain tier of seller, so if you're selling less than a certain number of listings, it's free.
And then once you get above a certain volume, it's a.
There's a per order and a per listing price.
So for us to reprice your listings and for us to fulfill your orders.

Omer (17:01.010)
Okay, and how long did it take you to build that business and kind of feel like you were getting traction?
Like you guys are doing what, somewhere like around 5,6 million ARR.

Max Kolysh (17:16.669)
the moment across all our products.

Omer (17:19.229)
So like, yeah, just give me sort of a picture like, like, how long were you working on this?
Was this like, because you had a couple of other products come along?
Right.
And so I want to kind of talk about when those happen.

Max Kolysh (17:27.309)
But like, so with Price Yak, we basically, once we had a few customers for it, we knew that it would be kind of a big thing because usually when there's just, you know, there's a few customers, that means there's probably more than just a few.
And so we were like, okay, let's take this seriously.
We started building that.
Then about a year down the line, we started thinking about new products that we can build.
What else can we leverage our technology and our infrastructure to build?
That's when Joe Lister came about.
And so Joe Lister was our.
Was our second SaaS product.

Omer (17:55.450)
And just briefly describe what that does.

Max Kolysh (17:58.170)
Yeah, so Joe Lister is the easiest and fastest multichannel selling tool for Amazon sellers.
So there's a lot of multichannel selling tools out there, but a lot of them focus on a bunch of retailers that most sellers don't actually make sales on.
Walmart, Newegg, things like that.
And so they focus on just all these tons of integrations, which makes the product a little bit more complex than it needs to be.
And so what we realized is actually for most Amazon sellers who are reselling, you know, typical products, they make the most sales on Amazon and they make the second most sales on ebay.
And that's just like the general breakdown.
Like, we've surveyed a bunch of sellers, and almost all of them are around 75, 80% Amazon, 15 or so percent eBay, and then maybe 5% everything else combined.
And so we said, hey, let's simplify that.
Let's make it a super easy product.
Just focused on Amazon to ebay, and we use Amazon as the source of truth.
So basically, within getting started, you just off your Amazon, off your ebay, and then we pull in all of your Amazon inventory.
Within a few minutes, you can make your first listing on ebay.
I mean, the coolest thing we do is also you can do bulk listings.
So we actually look at the Amazon page to figure out stuff like title description, stuff that you can't get a full view of through the Amazon API.
And so, you know, the Amazon page, we look at the manufacturer's kind of data, we look at reseller data to basically create a really rich listing for our sellers.

Omer (19:15.850)
And what were you doing to grow that?
Right.
Were you taking the same approach in terms of like, just finding Amazon sellers and just reaching out to them?

Max Kolysh (19:25.190)
Yeah, so Joe Lister was a little bit different.
The way it came about was we had a couple of pricey accelerators who said, hey, I actually want to do the same thing, but for my own inventory.
And we said, okay, that's kind of interesting.
It's, you know, backwards from what we've typically done.
And so there's a couple sellers in particular that we worked with, one of whom had a big newsletter.
And he said, hey, I think there's this opportunity to like, I know I need this.
And I think there's this opportunity to build this product in this kind of space, which is kind of a little bit more down market from typical channel Advisor type solutions, which are the big companies that customers like Nike use.
So he basically helped us with the initial product development and then he said, hey, I know there's other sellers that need this.
Let me advertise this in my newsletter.
And the thing about the advertisements, I can touch more on this later too, is that we basically haven't paid people to write about Joe Lister.
We've only given credit in terms of service fees, which I think is really nice because it aligns incentives really well.
And if somebody really wants to write about Joe Lister in exchange for credits on the platform, that means that A, they're enjoying the product enough to be using it themselves, you know, that they're actually using the credit.
It's not just like they're writing about it and taking money and B, it obviously it costs us less, you know what I mean?
We're just paying them in credit.
And so that's been a really effective kind of trick that we've used.
It's a good filtering mechanism for seeing who should be writing about your product.

Omer (20:43.400)
Yeah, no, that's really good.
I mean, it's really hard to trust some of the reviews you read out there for like hosting services or some tools when, you know, behind the scenes, you know those, they're offering massive affiliate commissions.
And that's like the main reason you're seeing such glowing articles, right?

Max Kolysh (21:01.320)
Yep.

Omer (21:01.800)
So.
So when somebody isn't getting paid to write that stuff, I think obviously that's a much stronger sign that you actually have a great product that you know people are willing to do that.

Max Kolysh (21:11.720)
Yeah, exactly.
I think it's good for the ecosystem to have people writing about it who are actually using it.

Omer (21:17.320)
So both these products started by you talking to users and people telling you what they wanted to do and you're just seeing that as an opportunity to solve the problem for them and turn it into a product.

Max Kolysh (21:31.080)
Absolutely.
Yeah.
We've always had a very customer focused approach.
So if we've always built stuff that people have told us directly or implied directly that they want, what else were

Omer (21:40.690)
you doing to try and grow?
So far we've talked about just the, I guess the prospecting, finding out where these customers are reaching out to them.
You're getting some kind of promotion through this person, having a big newsletter.
Was there anything else that you were doing?

Max Kolysh (22:02.730)
Yeah, so I think there's a couple things that we kind of got a little bit lucky in or, you know, made sense.
So for the early stuff, you know, we were in yc, so we had good access to a bunch of media publications.
I wrote a Huffington Post article at one point.
You know, we were in TechCrunch and Lifehacker and all these different sites.
So creating content that sites like that are willing to share is obviously very, very good.
Or I should say creating apps or services that sites like those are interested in sharing and then having the connections to get in touch with those and get featured there, obviously through YC or through whatever other means.
That's super helpful.
So that was a big thing early on down the line.
We also had this one interesting Stack Overflow post.
So we do a bunch of content marketing, but not in the traditional sense.
So we basically answered questions on Quora, on Stack Overflow, on all these kind of sites that have people asking questions.
And there's one on Stack Overflow that my co founder answered, which was like, does Amazon have an API?
You know, the accepted answer is no.
And then we just say, yes, it actually is possible to place orders on Amazon via API right below that.
And so we got a bunch of traffic from that.
Quora has been very good in terms of just people very directly asking questions about whether or not this service is possible.
We obviously have the advantage of, you know, it's not like there's many services that offer this because it is a really hard thing to do, to do in a sophisticated manner to create an API for these sites.
So we, we got lucky in the sense that a lot of people were asking and the answer was usually, no, it's not possible.
And then we can come in and say, actually, yes, it is possible.
And so that's kind of appealing to people.

Omer (23:34.080)
How do you guys do that?
How are you able to let people use.
Basically create an Amazon API?

Max Kolysh (23:42.400)
Yeah, that's where the hard tech comes in.
I think it's.
In theory, it's very easy.
We just have browser automation that does everything a human would do in placing an order, but it's actually incredibly complex behind the scenes.

Omer (23:54.370)
Yeah, I'm just like, my brain is just like whirring away kind of thinking about how you do something like that.

Max Kolysh (23:59.970)
Yeah.
Next time you're shopping on Amazon, you can kind of imagine a robot doing it and see how that would work.
But yeah, that's kind of why we had a big advantage is that, you know, it's not, it's a hard thing to build.
And so when people, you know, it was kind of like a magical experience for people who were like, I thought I had to pay people to do this manually and sit around at the computer all day and that sort of thing.
And we can provide them with this way, you know, 10x better experience.

Omer (24:24.020)
So Amazon sent you a cease and desist when you guys were building or trying to grow Zynq Save?

Max Kolysh (24:30.500)
That's right.

Omer (24:30.980)
Has there been any issue with doing this in terms of creating this sort of API experience for Amazon?

Max Kolysh (24:38.660)
No, we've been in touch with a bunch of people at Amazon and kind of cleared certain things, but no, we haven't had any issues.

Omer (24:45.780)
Okay, and so the third product, just tell me briefly about that.
So that's called Buy Bot.
Right?

Max Kolysh (24:50.900)
Buy Bot is actually, we're not focused on Buy Bot anymore.
We actually are about to open source it.

Omer (24:54.780)
Okay.

Max Kolysh (24:55.860)
That was kind of a hack week project that we briefly thought about productizing.

Omer (25:00.260)
So what's the enterprise solution you mentioned earlier?

Max Kolysh (25:03.140)
So we call that the Buy API.
Okay, Zynk API.
And that's just the same API, but also pricing, we call it Price and Details API.
So if you want to get a structured view of an Amazon page or a structured view of a particular seller on Walmart, that's all really, really easy to do with our API.
And we're, we just allow people to do very, very high volumes.
So we're scraping across the Internet, we're scraping tens of billions of pages a day.
And so we're one of the highest volume scrapers.
So we actually have some enterprise clients who are large retailers and they want to do competitive intelligence or their sellers themselves, all sorts of different kind of customers that want structured data from e commerce sites.

Omer (25:44.280)
You've also been doing some content marketing as a way to try and grow the business, but that hasn't been working out so well so far.
Right.
Can you talk a little bit about that?

Max Kolysh (25:55.560)
Yeah, I think we've, we've tried a bunch of content marketing.
It doesn't really tend to pan out.
I think in my experience, it's kind of what I mentioned earlier.
It's, you know, there's a whole ecosystem of content marketers and they kind of look for things to write about.
You know, they're, they're going to oversell their audience, they're going to do all this stuff and usually it's not particularly, it Ends up not being super effective or targeted.
So I think in that sense, again, it's really important to go to people who are really the kind of people that you're trying to reach.
You know, it sounds obvious, but you got to really grill them about, hey, how many, you know, people are actually on your mailing list.
Like, how many, how many of those are actually like real sellers?
Things like that I think are really important to figure out before.
But I do think there are certain advantages to.
We have done some content marketing more recently, and I think the thing that does work is really good content.
I think any company or a lot of companies have the capability to create actually good content.
That's not just another generic, like, list of best tools to do this and that we've created some good content based on proprietary data and doing.
Actually looking at the data that we have and doing some analytics on that and explaining what this means for sellers.
I think that sort of stuff is usually interesting, but obviously it takes a lot more work, so people tend to not do it as much.
And I think it's a lot better to have a smaller amount of content versus large amount of, smaller amount of good content versus a large amount of bad content or mediocre content.
But it's hard to incentivize that in the right way sometimes.

Omer (27:19.910)
Now I want to talk a little bit about branding.
You know, like Zync.
If people go to Zync IO, the homepage says, you know, Zync is an E commerce lab basically.
And then from there people can link out to the other solutions like Price Yak and Joe Lister, which are separate websites.
Why did you decide to do it that way?
Why not build, like, why do you have this kind of uber company and then these sort of brands, like, couldn't they just have been one product?
Or couldn't Zynk have just been the product and it did all these things that you describe in Price Yak and Joe Lister.

Max Kolysh (28:01.350)
That's a good question.
So definitely not, definitely can't be one product.
The products are too different.
Right.
They appeal to two different customer bases.
And especially that I didn't even touch on the kind of other stuff that we have and that we're working on might not just be for Amazon sellers.
Usually, you know, our theory and like, you know, the YC mindset and kind of this lean startup mindset is like, do one thing really well.
So we like to build things that address particular pain points and not these like monoliths that do a bunch of different stuff for people and so, and the customer bases are not the same customer base.
So it would just be confusing because half the people wouldn't use half the features.
The question though, I think is a good one because why didn't we just like kind of, why do we even bother with, you know, the Zinc IO kind of connection between them?
And we've kind of thought about that a lot internally and whether it makes sense to just, you know, launch these individual companies.
Because for all intents and purposes, you know, they're individual companies.
Like, we have specific teams working on them.
There's specific revenue lines, specific costs.
For all intents and purposes, they're basically separate companies that share some shared infrastructure.
And so we've thought about what the best way for branding that I would say we have not done a good job with branding just because it's, it is like confusing for some people.
So we're, we're still actively thinking about that.
I think that's an area where we can improve.

Omer (29:11.590)
Yeah.
Yeah.
Well, it's only confusing for people like me kind of coming in and, and trying to look at the big picture.
If you have a customer or somebody who does drop ship arbitrage and they find Price Yak and they go to pricejack.com, there's no confusion for them.
Right.
That's a very focused solution and they don't really care about the other stuff, so it's totally fine.

Max Kolysh (29:34.540)
Exactly.

Omer (29:35.420)
I'm glad you, you said earlier about, you know, do one thing really well and that kind of leads me to like, well, you guys are not doing one, you're doing like three things.
Right?
Like, so has that, number one, has that been an issue for you?
And why did you decide to kind of go down that road instead of saying, okay, yeah, we could do all these other things, but we're going to pick one of these and just try to go really deep on those.

Max Kolysh (30:05.270)
We've done both, I will say.
I mean, these things, you know, Price Yak probably can't make $100 million a year.
And so there's definitely, you know, effects of, hey, how many sellers are there?
How big is this market?
Right.
You know, it's unclear if it's even a $10 million a year market.
And so the point is we have a lot of ideas.
We've discovered a lot of really cool things.
I think that's what we've been really good at is being really opportunistic and seeing opportunities, seeing possibilities for products that we could build as we build new things.
You know, that's how Joister came about through, like a kind of a price.
Yeah.
Connection.
We said, actually, hey, we're really well suited to build this because we have these really similar tools already built in.
So things like that we've done really well with and we.
This is a big kind of ongoing challenge that I think we've done pretty well on is like, how do we separate these teams out, how do we incentivize these teams, and how do we keep it all unified in some way under the same company?
But the big idea is that we just want to work on a lot of stuff.
We see a lot of possibilities.
E commerce is a pretty interesting industry.
There's a lot of room for solutions to be made and improved upon.
So it's kind of hard to just say, okay, this is the narrow focus that we're taking.
But within the product team itself, it is very useful to have that narrow focus.
So I guess the difference is between, like, what me and my co founder are thinking about versus what the individual team is thinking about.

Omer (31:22.710)
What would you say to somebody, maybe another founder who's listening, who keeps hearing, do one thing really well, but they don't want to.
They have like, you know, a couple of ideas that maybe they want to run with.

Max Kolysh (31:33.830)
Yeah.
So I guess the advice is you can do one thing really well.
Just do.
Do things in series, not in parallel.
That's.
That's the advice that I would suggest.
In fact, that's like the kind of what we've done that I think has worked really well.
And when we tried to steer away from that, it hasn't worked as well.
I think you want to do things in order.
You know what I mean?
One thing at a time.
So that any one thing at a time is your top priority.
It's okay to have stuff on the background that's like.
Because in a lot of cases, if there's a lot of external dependencies, you can't just be working on one thing, but you can't take on three projects at the same time and take them from scratch to really successful.
For most people, I feel like, fail at that.
And so what you want to do is say, okay, I'm going to validate this idea.
I'm going to work on it for three months.
I'm going to give it my all.
And then depending on where that's at, I'm going to determine whether or not I should totally backburner that idea and work on a new thing or if I should continue pushing on that particular idea.
The mistake a lot of people make is not giving ideas long enough kind of incubation time.
I think people want to pivot too quickly.
I think there's, it's an art or whatever to figuring out how long you should spend on a particular idea.
It obviously depends on your personal goals as well.

Omer (32:37.180)
Yeah, no, that's good advice.
And you know, I get the impression like, you know, what's your co founder's name?

Max Kolysh (32:42.300)
Doug.

Omer (32:43.340)
Doug.
Yeah.
I kind of get the impression that, you know, you guys are driven by solving problems and every time a customer tells you about a problem, there's.
You're kind of driven to solve it and potentially find another opportunity for a product.
And maybe kind of having that kind of umbrella in terms of zinc gives you the kind of the freedom to explore some of those ideas.
And maybe that's what's going to lead to, I mean, having got to like over $5 million.
ARR is great, but I kind of get the feeling that you guys are still looking for something even bigger.

Max Kolysh (33:20.210)
Always.
Yeah.
That's why we call it a laboratory.
That's what we always are thinking about.
And we are working on a few new things right now that in 2019, hopefully we'll move the needle pretty significantly for us as well.

Omer (33:31.210)
So, I mean, when we talk about this, it's like you and Doug met at MIT.
You had this idea for a business, applied to YC, raised 400k, did some pivots, and then now you guys are running a business doing over 5 million a year.
What's been kind of one of the harder points or one of the bigger challenges that, that you sort of faced on that journey?

Max Kolysh (33:55.720)
There's been a lot, definitely tons of mistakes.
I wouldn't say mistakes.
I mean, it's just things that you have to learn for yourself a lot of the time.
So it's, it's very.
Yeah, there's, there's a lot of stuff to talk about here.
But I think one thing that we are still kind of struggling with is I think for the inception of an idea, it's really good to listen to your customers.
But later on, I think it's really important for also the team to have a really strong vision of where that product is going.
And I think for a lot of stuff, we've relied on customers to give us all the insights.
But a lot of the time, if you want to make a really, really kind of futuristic, kind of moving the needle product, I think it's really important to have a really good picture yourself and have more visionaries behind the scenes as well.
I think the problem that people make is they do that too early and then they actually end up building something that nobody wants.
But I think that once you.
The way you want to start is by listening to customers to kind of evaluate where you should be building in what space.
But after a certain point, I think it's really important.
You know, you obviously want to continue listening to your customers, but it's also very important to have a specific direction that you've set out on that's more than just, you know, customer driven.
And that's a little bit of a controversial idea, which is why I kind of like, like talking about it.
But it's definitely.
There's definitely been advances that we've made when we sit down and think really hard about a problem ourselves for one of our products versus just listening to customers.
You know, listening to customers and listening to everybody.
Obviously, as you get bigger is also really challenging because you have feature creepy, you have a ton of different kinds of customers.
You end up building a product that's kind of this, you know, has a lot of different stuff from a lot of different people.
And it's a, you know, it's monolith.
But in reality, you want to really, like, focus on a narrow customer base, build, think a lot more about the product.
So there's this nuance of like, how much do you listen to customers versus how much of the product are you developing yourself?
I think that's been a big challenge for us.

Omer (35:34.120)
Yeah, yeah, no, that's.
That's an interesting point because I guess you have like two camps, right?
Like, one people are either very, very customer driven or then you have kind of more about sort of visionary, whether that's like, you know, the Steve Jobs in terms of.
I know better.

Max Kolysh (35:49.920)
Exactly.
Yeah.

Omer (35:50.880)
But, you know, why can't you do both?
Like, why can't you listen to customers in terms of understanding what problems they have and keep doing a good job in terms of solving those, but they're not necessarily going to help you think about what that product should look like in three years time or five years time.
And there needs to be some kind of vision in terms of where you're going to take this thing.

Max Kolysh (36:13.330)
That's exactly right.
Yeah.

Omer (36:15.090)
Yeah.
Interesting.
All right, we should wrap up.
So I'm going to move on to the lightning round.
Going to ask you seven quick fire questions and just try to answer them as quickly as you can.
So you ready?

Max Kolysh (36:26.530)
All right.

Omer (36:27.250)
Okay, cool.
What's the best piece of business advice you've ever received?

Max Kolysh (36:31.010)
Best piece of business advice is to Fall in love with the problem and not the solution.
I kind of alluded to that earlier, but you want to basically be solving a real problem and not be tied to the actual way that you're solving it, because that could change a lot.

Omer (36:44.170)
What book would you recommend to our audience and why?

Max Kolysh (36:46.810)
So we have required reading at Zinc, which is a book called Rework by Jason Fried and David Heinemeier.
And they've started a couple of bootstrap companies like 37 Signals and Really Short, really good read, kind of contrary to popular Silicon Valley wisdom.
So recommend it.

Omer (37:01.760)
Would you say, like your culture is similar, it's like kind of reflective of what they cover in the book?

Max Kolysh (37:05.880)
Very similar.

Omer (37:06.640)
Interesting.

Max Kolysh (37:07.240)
Yeah, very similar.

Omer (37:07.920)
What's one attribute or characteristic in your mind of a successful entrepreneur?

Max Kolysh (37:11.760)
I think the most important thing, the single number one thing, is determination.
I don't think you have to be like super smart.
Obviously it helps, you know, you don't have to have any other qualities for sure except for determination.
The reason that, you know, I say that is entrepreneurs fail because they run out of money or they give up.
Right.
And if you have, you know, if you kind of are figure out the money side and then you're determined enough, you are pretty much guaranteed success.

Omer (37:36.890)
What's your favorite personal productivity tool or habit?

Max Kolysh (37:40.330)
I like thinking through a lot of things in the morning during my shower routine.
And I think that I bought these shower sticky notes, waterproof little sticky notes for the shower a while back.
And those are really, really convenient for organizing your thoughts in the shower.

Omer (37:56.410)
I've got to do something like that.
It's like I've had so many great ideas in the shower and by the time I get out I have forgotten half of them.

Max Kolysh (38:03.850)
Their tagline is don't let another good idea go down the drain.
So there you go.

Omer (38:07.690)
Love it.
What's a new or crazy business idea you'd love to pursue if you had the time?

Max Kolysh (38:12.810)
I have a ton of ideas.
Every entrepreneur I think should have a list.
Like a long.
Anytime you have an idea that's interesting, you should write it down.
I have a list of probably a couple hundred, 250 maybe.
And there's a lot of stuff to choose from.
But one more, more realistic one is I want to do like a CEO or a founder kind of exchange mentorship program instead of just the normal kind of mentorship venues, dinners, whatever.
I want to do like a one to one, you know, you spend you as a CEO, spend two hours a month shadowing a specific other CEO to kind of Learn about what their day to day habits are, what their day to day work looks like in a way.
More practical, hands on setting and then you just kind of pay it back.
It could be a pretty fun.
I don't know if that's a business, but that's kind of an idea.
I have another one that's a little bit sillier, but there's this really amazing hangover prevention cure called milk thistle and I want to create like a beer that has milk thistle infused into it.
So one day.

Omer (39:10.870)
Nice.
What's an interesting or fun fact about you that most people don't know?

Max Kolysh (39:14.270)
So I'm actually Russian and I was born in Russia and part of my family still lives in Russia and I'm fluent in Russian, so.

Omer (39:20.200)
Wow.

Max Kolysh (39:21.480)
I've been told I don't give off that the Russian vibe, but yeah, no,

Omer (39:25.000)
I didn't even get a hint.
Like when somebody's usually born in a different country, you can usually kind of.
Well, when did you move to the

Max Kolysh (39:31.760)
us When I was five.
Okay.

Omer (39:34.000)
Yeah.
And finally, what's one of your most important passions outside of your work?

Max Kolysh (39:37.400)
I think I work a lot, but in my free time I like to snowboard, kiteboard, all sorts of board sports.

Omer (39:43.990)
Cool.
All right, cool.
Thanks Max, for joining me.
It's been great just to talk about Zynq and your suite of products and sort of telling the story and how you guys have built this business.
If people want to find out more about Zynq, they can go to Zynq IO.

Max Kolysh (39:59.830)
Yep.

Omer (40:00.350)
And on the homepage there there are links to the other products like Price Yak and Joe Lister.
That and the API that people can go and check out.
And if people want to get in touch with you, what's the best for them to do that?

Max Kolysh (40:16.530)
Yep.
Feel free to email me.
I'm Max Zinc I.O.
or Max Joe lister.com.
shoot me an email and I totally

Omer (40:24.010)
get back that or max@price yak.com I do.

Max Kolysh (40:28.770)
I believe I have a max@price yak.com as well.
I don't use that one as frequently, but yeah.

Omer (40:32.850)
Cool.
Thanks for joining me, man.
It's been pleasure and I wish you all the best.

Max Kolysh (40:36.050)
All right, great chatting with you.
Thanks for having me.

Omer (40:38.290)
Cheers.