Omer (00:11.840)
Welcome to another episode of the SaaS Podcast.
I'm your host, Omer Khan and this is the show where I interview proven founders and industry experts who share their stories, strategies and insights to help you build, launch and grow your SaaS business.
Today's guest is Rob Rawson.
Rob is the co founder and CEO of Time Doctor and staff dot com.
Time Doctor is an app that helps you manage your time and your team's time more effectively.
And Staff.com is a global recruitment platform that helps companies hire talented people from anywhere in the world.
Rob originally trained as a medical doctor and worked in hospitals in Australia for three years before becoming a full time hospital entrepreneur.
In this episode we talk about how Rob started his career as a medical doctor working in hospitals in Australia.
How his real passion was in building his own business but he couldn't get traction.
How he launched Time Doctor without any technical skills or software background.
How he turned that into a business that's now doing over a million dollars a year and the highs and lows of being an entrepreneur and how Rob deals with that.
Rob, welcome to the show.
Rob Rawson (01:29.520)
Hello.
It's great to be here.
Omer (01:31.840)
Now, I gave the audience a brief overview of your product and business, but tell us a little bit more about yourself personally.
Who is Rob when he's not working?
Rob Rawson (01:40.480)
Well, I live in Australia in Sydney.
Beautiful city, but it's a little bit cold right now.
We're in the opposite side of the world and I'm living with my wife and two kids.
I have two very young kids.
I have a seven month, ten month old and a two and a half year old boy who's a little crazy and always is up to no good.
Omer (02:01.820)
And one of them kept you awake last night, I think?
Rob Rawson (02:04.620)
Yeah, from 3 till 4 in the morning.
He thought that there were spiders in the bed and he just wouldn't give up.
And he wouldn't take the explanation that no, there's no spiders in the bed, look at the bed, there's no spiders.
He just, yeah, wonderful.
All right.
Omer (02:23.540)
We like to kick things off with a success quote to better understand what drives and motivates our guests.
What is one of your favorite quotes?
Rob Rawson (02:33.100)
I love this quote from Tony Robbins, which is that the path to success is to take massive, determined action.
And I think it brings it down to the simplicity of what it actually takes, which is massive action, not just one or two steps, not just taking a little bit of action.
Omer (02:54.290)
Can you give me maybe a brief example of maybe how that's played out in your life?
Rob Rawson (03:01.970)
Well, I can give an Example of a business that we were doing before, which was really in the arbitrage space on online marketing.
So we were actually buying a lot of advertising from Google AdWords and we were redirecting it to affiliate sites.
And it was kind of a bit of a short term play that was making a lot of money at the time.
And I know several other people that did that same strategy, the exact same strategy, because they knew that it was working.
They could see that they could make money with it.
But the difference was that there were some people that made 10,000amonth, there were some people that made 2,000amonth, there were SOME people that made 20,000amonth, there were SOMETY people that made 100,000amonth.
And the top people doing that exact same strategy made actually millions of dollars.
Over $10 million a year.
Some people made from this exact same strategy.
And the only difference was the ones who made $10 million a year had massive action.
They literally did 100 times more action than the other person.
So specifically what that meant was advertising on every keyword, being very systematic about it.
Hiring a team.
We actually had a team in the Philippines at the time that was doing this strategy as well.
So it's literally about taking massive action rather than taking a small amount of action or a medium amount of action to achieve your goal.
Omer (04:26.020)
Got it.
Okay.
Let's start by giving our listeners a better understanding of your current businesses.
Time Doctor and staff dot com.
Who are your target customers for these products and what are the top pain points that you're trying to solve for them?
Rob Rawson (04:44.020)
So for Time Doctor, it came out of my own need, which is that I had a team in the Philippines in an office, and I wanted to get out of the office and have everyone work from home.
So I wanted to make sure that I knew that everyone was being productive even when working from home.
And I wasn't in front of them.
I didn't know that they actually were even in front of their computer because I wasn't with them at all.
And so that's where that software came out of.
And I also came to make it so that it was something that I would want to personally use for my own productivity.
So I was combining those two elements into it.
And that's the same similar kind of need that we have mostly at the moment.
We have people that have remote teams around the world.
They might have a team in the Philippines or in Eastern Europe, and that's what they're using the software for.
But we do also have people using it for their individual productivity.
And stuff.com came from a similar need as how do I hire somebody in the Philippines?
And how do I.
If I want a virtual assistant in the Philippines, how do I find that person?
Got it.
Omer (05:46.070)
Okay.
Let's talk about the early days because you have a really interesting background and how you got to where you are today.
Let's talk about your life as a doctor.
What was your.
Rob Rawson (06:06.230)
What was your motivation for going to medical doctor?
Yeah, it seems like a long time ago now, but it was actually, it wasn't necessarily my goal.
In the beginning.
I went through a few different paths and even during medicine, I was trying various businesses because I was always in this business mindset.
And I even took a year off doing medicine to do a marketing advisory business, which is absolutely crazy.
I don't know if you heard of Jay Abraham.
Omer (06:35.990)
Yes.
Yeah.
Rob Rawson (06:36.790)
Yeah.
So I, I listened to all of his stuff and read his stuff and I thought, oh, I'm now a marketing expert.
So then I decided to take a year off medicine to do a marketing advisory business.
So you can see that I wasn't quite in the mode of being a doctor and.
But I did finish it because I wanted to complete it and because I wasn't successful at the marketing advisory business.
And so I completed that and, and it was amazing.
It was just that I was always driven by this need to, to be in business and, and to take on challenges in business.
So I, I think it's more that I have that desire to create businesses.
Omer (07:18.060)
So you always had.
Or from.
At least from the.
From.
For a long time you had this passion to build your own business.
And so what, the only thing that kept you from actually doing it full time was just that you weren't generating enough income from that.
Rob Rawson (07:38.750)
From medicine or from business?
Yes, probably.
Yeah.
It was a combination of it.
I wanted to finish what I started, so I started medicine.
I wasn't certain that business was my path when I actually started a business and it was earning very good money.
Then I eventually transitioned to giving up medicine, but it's a very hard decision to make because it's an amazing profession in medicine, to be honest.
To go into more of the details of how my psyche was at that time.
I was very money focused in the beginning.
I had these goals to make millions of dollars, et cetera.
And I actually at one point did make a lot of money and it felt quite empty, to be honest, because I didn't have a passion around the business.
I didn't.
It was really purely about the money.
So I transitioned that to being about, not just about the money, but really about my passion as well.
So I actually really enjoy business now as well.
Not.
And so it really isn't just about the money.
You know, the money's in there, but it is about my passion and I just love doing it.
And I would, I would do it probably even if I wasn't earning money.
If I could put the money just to charity, if I could still earn money and give it to charity, I'd probably still run my business.
Omer (09:03.880)
What was the business that you said you made a lot of money from but didn't feel excited about?
Rob Rawson (09:09.880)
That was really the arbitrage that I mentioned before where it's really a short term thing, it's an opportunistic thing that worked very well and a lot of people were doing until Google banned it.
That's what I was doing.
Omer (09:26.820)
And what is it.
And you said that today what you do, you would do even if you weren't being paid for it.
What is it about what you're doing that you love so much?
Rob Rawson (09:38.980)
I love creating the business.
I love the challenge of trying to make it successful.
It's kind of like playing a video game really.
But the video game is a real life situation where you're making money and where you're achieving a goal and where you're trying to figure out this complicated thing where how do you compete with all these other businesses, how do you position the market?
How do you make yourself really a great proposition for other people?
So it's all of those things combined together.
Omer (10:09.570)
Do you remember the day when you decided to quit your job as a doctor and become a full time entrepreneur?
Rob Rawson (10:18.210)
I roughly remember it.
It was basically that I was earning really good money from my business and in one stage I was sitting in my bedroom, I was still in my parents place and I was in my bedroom and I had dozens and dozens of checks from different affiliate companies.
And yeah, so I was just doing very well from the business.
So I was actually working only one week a month as a doctor at that stage in any case.
So I still had a lot of time to work on the business but I realized that it's not something that you can do half time being a doctor.
You really have to put your entire passion and life into it and I wasn't willing to do that, so.
So that's why I gave it up.
Omer (11:08.880)
Now.
Did you spend some time then doing more building business around Internet marketing before you actually got into the software business?
Rob Rawson (11:18.720)
Yes, yeah, absolutely.
I've.
I've actually started a number of different projects online, some of them absolutely crazy.
One was a little website that would detect if you were lying.
It would actually give you these.
It would give you.
It would actually teach you how to detect lies.
So basically it would show you these, these cards.
And each time it would have no aces.
And you'd have to say into the microphone, there are no aces.
There are no aces.
And then one time they would show that there are four aces, four cards, they're all aces.
And then that time you would be lying.
And then.
So you'd record this and then you'd actually try and detect when other people were lying based on their responses, just based on their voice tone, etc.
Crazy idea.
Really crazy.
It was based on the show Lie to Me.
I don't know if you saw that, but.
Omer (12:17.660)
So what, what, what did I, I guess, did that work out as a business?
Rob Rawson (12:22.300)
No, it was great.
It was, it was technically really difficult.
And it is also.
It was also just pretty much impossible to detect if the person was lying based on just their voice tone.
So it was a stupid idea.
Omer (12:35.500)
Okay, so how did you come up with the idea for Time doctor?
So you said that you were, you know, you had, you know, employees working in the Philippines.
You wanted to get in control, but you're not a software guy, right?
I mean, so what, what, what was the sort of the, the process you went to in, in terms of saying, you know, I have a need and then I'm good, I'm going to be the one who's going to go and build it.
Rob Rawson (13:06.660)
I just decided to do it and then I tried to figure out how to do it.
So I tried a number of methods.
I tried hiring people odess to start with, and that was mostly a failure in the beginning.
Most of the initial attempts were fairly, fairly poor.
It was very difficult to find someone who was great and who was able to the work.
So eventually I did find someone who could do it, and then it just built from there.
Omer (13:37.840)
And at this point, were you thinking about building this as a product or were you just trying to build a tool that you could use yourself?
Rob Rawson (13:47.690)
Initially it was as a tool for myself.
And then over time I realized, well, I'm putting so much into this, why don't I market it as a product?
Got it.
Omer (13:58.930)
Okay.
All right.
So you eventually found somebody, you started to build this product.
What did you start to do to try and market it and get the word out about the product?
Rob Rawson (14:17.340)
Content marketing was probably the number one thing that I focused on.
So actually did a number of blog articles I think because I was contacting a lot of people in the related industries in the industry of hiring remote workers, they actually started to refer it.
So there's a lot of a referral source that started to build up as well.
I had some strategies such as going on to Quora and answering questions there.
Just very grassroots online marketing.
And I also have a team, an online marketing team in the Philippines that does research that helps to write articles.
They don't necessarily write the actual article, but they do the research behind the article.
They help to generate leads, things like that.
Omer (15:10.890)
Got it.
Rob Rawson (15:12.010)
Okay.
Omer (15:14.090)
All right, so you got this thing up and running.
Were you, were you still working with somebody that you had.
Where did you find this person to build this product for you?
Rob Rawson (15:31.130)
The initial people that I found were on from Odesk and other platforms.
I just, I really tried a number of different ways, but I.
It's only in the last six to 12 months that I've found a formula that is fantastic for finding offshore developers that are affordable.
I also was initially hiring at a very low rate, so closer to $1,000 a month US or even lower.
And I also found some people on the ground in the Philippines.
So there was a bunch of different strategies that I found, but now I have a much more robust strategy that I'm using.
Omer (16:14.450)
So how do you go and find somebody these days?
Rob Rawson (16:18.930)
There's a few components to it, but in terms of the actual finding a person, and this is at a salary of at least 3,000amonth or maybe a little bit less, but not at the sort of really low levels.
It's from posting on Stack Exchange.
I'm not sure if you heard of Stack Exchange.
Omer (16:38.850)
Yep.
Rob Rawson (16:39.610)
And there's another site called WeWork remotely, which is from the Basecamp guys.
So those two sites have a lot of people that are working remotely around the world.
And you need to hire at a reasonable level for the country that you're hiring in.
So if you're hiring in Pakistan, 3,000, 2,000amonth is actually reasonable.
If you're hiring in the U.S. you basically, you're excluding your entire.
So you basically cannot hire in the US So if you want to hire in the US you need to be hiring at a much higher salary level.
You need to really decide what you're going to do in that regard.
And then the second component to it is how do you evaluate people?
And I use HackerRank for that, which is also used by Facebook and has been used by Evernote and a bunch of really high level companies studies and that gives them an Actual programming test to do.
So I give them a really, really difficult test.
Most of them don't pass it on the first go, but on the second or third go they do some of them and then we do an interview after that.
So it's a very, very systematic process.
Omer (17:52.500)
So I've never used HackerRank.
How does it work?
Rob Rawson (17:57.620)
So you have an actual test that is something that I can hardly even understand myself just by looking at it.
And it's sort of.
It's just really complicated stuff.
So they'll ask all of these, these questions that.
And then the person has to.
It's not, it's not a number of questions, it's just one question actually.
And the person has to create a program in whatever language they're using.
So it can be php, it can be Ruby on Rails, it can be anything.
And they create the program and then HackerRank will actually automatically determine if they correctly created the program.
So it'll automatically put in an algorithmic response.
So enter one and it should come out as 10 as the answer, if that makes sense.
So some very complicated mathematical questions that the person has to create a program to answer them.
Omer (18:53.390)
And then.
So how do you do this?
You set up an account and then you send them a link and then you get the results back on how they did.
Rob Rawson (19:02.430)
You actually can get them to create a test, which is what I have done.
I got them to create a test for us.
I think it costs thousand dollars now to do that.
And you can also create a test yourself if you know how to create a test.
But that's quite difficult if you're not a developer.
So this is really coming from myself and I'm not a developer.
I actually have done it at some stages in my life.
I've done a little bit of development, but I'm not an experienced developer, so I don't know how to evaluate people.
So this is really a great way to do it.
And it's also, it's very.
It's not time intensive, it's easy to do.
Omer (19:40.240)
And then.
Were you doing this right from the outset when you started hiring developers?
Rob Rawson (19:47.760)
No, in the beginning it was more.
We had one person who was good and then they would evaluate other people.
And that can work as well, but it takes more time and it's not as systematic.
And actually the evaluation is usually just haphazard and not based on their programming skills.
If you interview developers, you not necessarily getting the right kind of result.
I mean, one of the guys that I hired initially from the Philippines, he could hardly even talk I mean, the guy, he, he sounded like, he sounded like he was not intelligent, let's put it that way.
And he's an amazing developer and you can misjudge people quite easily on an interview.
So I think actually the best way to evaluate people for developers or for any kind of job is what exactly matches the work that they're going to do now for this test, it actually doesn't exactly match, but it at least gives you an evaluation of their intelligence levels.
Like if they can solve this, you know, they can solve difficult problems.
Because it's a very difficult problem.
Omer (20:57.720)
Yeah, yeah.
And so now you're getting a much higher success rate doing it this way.
Rob Rawson (21:04.120)
Yeah, this is amazing success.
We had a guy who left us to go to Google and so we're getting some really high level developers.
Omer (21:17.050)
Wow.
So looking back at the early days of building this software business, what do you think was one of the biggest mistakes that you made?
Rob Rawson (21:30.490)
So one of the mistakes was trying to do too many things at the same time, like trying to do too many projects.
But at the same time that was a way for me to actually try different things and see if they would work.
So it hasn't been too much of a mistake as long as I didn't put too much into it.
So that's one thing.
But in terms of the actual building our current business, the biggest mistake was not following the lean startup advice, which is building features that are not used.
So the thing that we did really well is that we were always using the software for time.
Dr. All the time.
So most of the features that we were using, we were actually using them at the time.
The times when I didn't do that for staff.com and for some of the technology that we built, we were building technology for months and months and months and months and months and we launched it.
It was always a disaster.
So it's always important to be using the technology as you go and incrementally improve it based on the actual real feedback from customers or from yourself using it rather than a theoretical concept of what the software should be, what was going on.
Omer (22:48.210)
You would sometimes have an idea for something that you think would be great to put into the product, even though it wasn't something you were using yourself and then find it wasn't that useful.
Rob Rawson (22:59.730)
It's more that because it took so long to launch that particular thing and it wasn't what was next needed by the customers, it just was never ever useful.
It was just going in a direction that wouldn't be useful.
So it's not that it was necessarily the wrong idea, actually probably was the right idea potentially, but because it wasn't the next right idea, it never worked out because it's always important to work on.
Well, what's, what's actually blocking the customers now.
What do they need the most?
If you work on what they need, you know, 10 times, you know, 10 years from now or two years from now, that's not going to be effective.
You have to work on what they need now.
And then when you've completed that, then maybe later you can work on those other things.
Does that make sense?
Omer (23:48.160)
Yeah.
Yeah, it does.
At what point did you feel that you were getting some meaningful traction with this business?
Rob Rawson (23:56.670)
It's always been a process of ups and downs.
So sometimes I feel like it's going really well.
But I would say that just when we reached a million dollars Runway run rate, I would say that would be a good time when we were feeling happy as a business.
Omer (24:24.280)
When did you hit that milestone?
Rob Rawson (24:27.480)
We hit it a few months ago.
Omer (24:29.560)
Oh, congratulations.
That's awesome.
Okay.
And then you.
At what point did Staff.com come along?
I guess in many ways it's a natural extension to what you were doing anyway, to run your own business.
Rob Rawson (24:43.000)
Yeah, I had the idea of doing this business and I kind of knew that the domain name staff.com was available.
And so just I had this vision of what I was going to do with it.
Now, as it happens, the vision that I was thinking about is not the way that it's evolved, but that's.
That's how it happened.
Like, I just had this vision that I was just, oh, this is going to be like a billion dollar company.
And this is how it's going to work.
It's going to have, you know, all of these stuff.
They're going to do this.
And as I started to build it, it's not what ended up happening, but it's.
It's evolving in a really nice direction and I think it's providing some good value.
And we want to make it kind of like the LinkedIn for remote work so that it's actually free at the moment.
We made it completely free.
Omer (25:35.320)
Can you give me a sense of the size of the business?
Any numbers that you can share to give us doing?
Rob Rawson (25:42.520)
We've got about 170,000 workers on the platform, which is good enough to get a really good result.
When you're hiring in the Philippines, if you're hiring a virtual assistant, for example, we're not quite at the level of trying to get.
If you Want to get a good developer.
I mentioned before about the Stack Exchange as being the right place to hire from.
And so that's, that's a much better place.
Omer (26:09.200)
Looking back at the last few years, what has been one of the hardest things about building this product and business?
What do you look back and just wish you had known when you started out?
Rob Rawson (26:25.130)
Well, one of the things is, always feels like it's, you're going through ups and downs.
So it's not one point, but there's a lot of times when you feel like, oh, this is not working out and it's not this month, it didn't grow this month or the server went down.
We've had multiple times when the server went down.
And because I'm not a technical person myself and I'm relying on technical people around the world, it's challenging to, to when the server goes down and I don't know how long it's going to take, are we going to be able to solve this?
And so that's, that's one of the biggest challenges.
And so there's been several times like that when I thought, oh geez, what am I doing?
And it's, and it's also really, really hard work, to be honest.
It's actually very hard to build it up.
And I think you just have to work harder than the competition in a lot of cases.
I actually think there are easy businesses, but they're not very, very common.
They're very few and far between.
Most businesses is just a lot of work to get to that momentum stage where you can actually just keep going and going and be more and more successful.
Omer (27:34.470)
What advice would you give to entrepreneurs who are maybe listening to this, who are maybe kind of in that sort of mental state more often these days where they feel like this is not working right, maybe they're having those lows.
You know, you're a seasoned entrepreneur.
You've kind of gone through that process with several businesses.
Is there sort of any parting words of wisdom you would give them?
Rob Rawson (28:05.630)
It really is about your attitude in the end.
If you have the right kind of belief and mental attitude that you'll never give up, then you will succeed in the end.
Even if you have to change your approach, you will definitely succeed.
So it is about, it's about changing your approach, but it's about also never giving up at the same time.
And if you do that, for sure you're going to succeed.
Omer (28:29.460)
Yeah, that's excellent advice.
And I had Adeo Ressi, who's the founder of the Founders Institute on.
I can't remember what episode number it was.
And he kind of had a similar comment where he said, you only fail if you give up.
And I think that's a great way to kind of think about it in terms of.
I think your explanation is a little bit more nuanced because, you know, if you have a bad idea, which clearly is not going to work, you need to give up at some point.
But, you know, it's.
I guess it's listening and figuring out where you need to pivot, where you need to adapt, change your approach, but just not giving up in principle, in terms of building a business, that's really solid advice.
