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 interview is with Ruben Garmez.
Ruben is the founder of bidsketch, a web app which helps freelancers, consultants and agencies to create professional looking proposals in minutes.
Ruben launched Bidsketch as a one person company in 2009.
Since then it's grown to help over a thousand paying customers earn over $261 million in revenue.
Ruben, welcome to the show.
Ruben (00:54.200)
Thanks.
Thanks for inviting me.
Omer (00:56.600)
So I've told our audience just a little bit about you.
Tell us in your own words a little bit more about you personally and then give us an overview of your product and business.
Ruben (01:05.560)
Sure.
So let's see.
I've been in tech for, I don't know, like 15, 20 years, something like that.
I started off as a web developer and eventually became a web manager.
So I managed teams, I managed people that manage other people, built bidsketch on the side, all that.
I did that mostly in Florida.
That's where I lived and spent a lot of time there and then moved over to Spokane, Washington.
That's where I am now and that point.
So right now I have a one and a half year old son and we're probably looking to move over to Portland soon and we'll be having a second child.
Omer (01:57.950)
So most people talk about moving to places like Florida and people like you and I moved to places like Washington where the weather is not so sunny.
Ruben (02:07.790)
Yeah, yeah.
The humidity just did it for me.
You know, it was just too hot all the time and humid and you can stand in the shade.
So that was, that was really tough for me.
Just took a lot of my energy.
Before then I lived in California, in Southern California, in San Diego.
And that was better.
It was still a little hot, so I think I prefer it to be a little bit more gray and cooler.
Right.
Seasons are nice, that sort of thing.
Omer (02:37.210)
Cool.
Yeah, I love it around here in the Seattle area.
I don't think I could imagine living anywhere else now.
Ruben (02:42.090)
Yeah, yeah.
I looked at a lot of cities across the US and to me it just seemed like a no brainer either Portland or Seattle.
I can really think of anywhere else that I'd want to live.
Omer (02:57.010)
Cool.
So before we dive into more details, we like to kick things off with a success quote to better understand what drives and motivates our guests.
Do you have a favorite Success quote.
Ruben (03:08.290)
So there are a few things that I've heard.
I wouldn't say that I have a favorite success quote.
I don't.
I probably don't think and work in that way, like have something motivational up on my wall or anything or on my computer that I look at or think about.
For me, it's more about process.
What I do every once in a while is I'll stop.
This may be every few days or every day, depends.
Every week I'll stop and I'll think.
I'll ask myself a question.
What am I working on right now?
Is this the most.
Are these things the most important things that I need to work on to get traction?
These things moving me forward?
Right.
So.
And I'll look at my list of tasks over the next few days and just try to assess that and make adjustments.
Omer (04:05.210)
Cool.
So before we talk about bidsketch, I want to talk a little bit more about you.
Tell me more about what you were doing before you launched bidsketch.
Ruben (04:17.540)
I was in West Palm beach, and I'd been with a payroll company for about eight years or so.
I was a web development manager there.
I was going to a lot of meetings.
I'm trying to think of anything else that I was doing.
I'm sure I was doing other things, but it felt like all of my time was spent going to meetings.
Going to meetings and protecting the team from, you know, from the execs and things like that.
So it wasn't the most fun thing that I could be doing.
And at that point, I realized that it didn't matter how much they paid me.
Money, more money was not going to make me happier.
Right.
It wasn't going to, like, make a dent.
It wasn't going to make a difference at all.
It was about what I was doing on a daily basis.
So it's very interesting compared to, like, when I first started in tech, I had jobs that didn't make.
Where I didn't make a lot of money.
And I struggled to pay my bills and all that stuff.
And at that point, it was very important to.
It was about money.
Right.
Money was a huge factor, especially when you're poor, you come from poor family and you're not paying, you're not able to pay your bills and you're struggling that way.
So it's easy for me to now at that point say, well, it doesn't matter.
They can double my salary.
Which I did say that at one point they could double my salary.
Wouldn't make a difference.
When it comes to happiness, but back there was a point where it made a difference.
Right.
So anyway, I was unhappy.
I decided to launch a product on the side that was bidsketch and shoot.
Sorry about that.
Hear my son in the background.
Omer (06:14.040)
Yeah, that's no problem.
That's real life, right?
So why, you know, you'd been in this corporate world for well over a decade.
Why decide to start a business?
Why not look for another job?
What was the motivation behind starting your own business?
Ruben (06:34.290)
I'd always wanted to start something, to have some sort of business.
I'd say I just never really got serious about it until later, until I was pretty unhappy.
And I kind of used that job and that situation to help drive me and motivate me to really take action and launch something.
So a lot of it was about seeing, really about seeing what I could do by myself.
Right.
A business where I was fully in control.
And I did everything, you know, everything to make that business successful, to see if I could, to learn about the process of making money, you know, starting something that makes money and really to achieve freedom.
That was a huge component of it.
Right.
Instead of just getting another job, sure, I can get another job, but I'd still be working for other people and I'd still feel those, you know, have those same constraints.
Launching my own business, working for myself would give me the ability to just travel, work as much or as little as I wanted, do things like that.
Omer (07:47.470)
Now, from what I understand, you were pretty deliberate even from that early stage that you wanted to have your own business, but you didn't want it to grow into some, some big business with lots of employees where you'd end up basically doing what you'd been doing in the corporate world.
Ruben (08:03.060)
Right?
Right.
Yeah.
Throughout every stage of the business, even at the very earliest stages, thinking about the type of business that I could start, I thought about that.
Like what, what type of a business would be lower maintenance, wouldn't be something that I need to be on call all the time and talking to people and would have a lot of support.
Right.
So those were all things that I thought about.
And anytime I've done anything significant or big with my business, whether it's adding really big features, expanding the market a little bit because it started off specific to designers and I widened that or changing pricing, things like that, I always thought about how is this going to impact me from a flexibility and freedom standpoint.
Right.
And even now, so now I have three full time employees, you know, on the payroll, the, you know, team to where we all jump on slack and Talk and stuff like that.
And.
But before, before that, I was working with contractors because I felt like that would give me a lot of flexibility.
So it.
I felt some anxiety around hiring people full time.
And I put it off for a long time because of that, because I thought that that would change things.
But after a while, I realized that this is my company and I can build it however I want.
I can design it how I'd like.
So as long as I hire the right people and set the right expectations, that won't be a problem.
Unless I make it a problem.
Omer (09:43.710)
How did your family and friends react when you told them, hey, I've got this great job and I'm going to quit and go and do something else?
Ruben (09:54.350)
It was mostly good.
There were a couple people that thought it was a bad idea.
My mother was probably just.
She was kind of in the middle, right?
She was just like all mothers, very concerned about what this would mean for me financially and all this stuff, whether this was a risky thing or not.
But, you know, she wasn't saying that I should or shouldn't do it either way.
My brothers were, you know, very supportive.
I did have a couple of people, one friend that said, shouldn't do this.
You have a really good job, you're getting paid a lot of money and all that.
Why would you do something like this?
Right?
Why you do something that's so risky?
And my wife was fully supportive the whole way.
So that was, you know, that was great and necessary, I would say.
Omer (10:52.340)
And she was the important one to get on your side.
Right?
Ruben (10:54.620)
Right, right, Absolutely.
Omer (10:56.580)
Okay, Ruben, let's take a journey together back to your early days and just explore how you got started.
Can you tell me where the idea for bidsketch came from?
Ruben (11:07.530)
Sure.
So it was at that job that I was talking to a friend and he was getting ready to talk to a client for the first time.
He had never done freelancing, so he wanted to know how that process worked.
So I was explaining the proposal process and I remember going online to help him out with that to look for templates.
I think I was looking for.
I ran into an app that was like a plugin to Word, and I thought, oh, this is neat.
I wonder if there's something like FreshBooks.
But for proposals.
I didn't find anything.
And I thought, wow, this is.
This can't be right.
I did find some products that were web based apps that created proposals, but they were super enterprise tools and they were nothing like what I was thinking.
So then I did some keyword research and found that, hey, there's probably some demand here.
I think I can turn some of this traffic, which seems to be very low competition for it.
Not a ton of it, but there's enough where I can turn some of this traffic into paying customers.
So that was really what kicked it off.
Omer (12:23.990)
Did you have other ideas for a business before this one?
Ruben (12:28.940)
Yeah, well, I. I started to build all sorts of things and never really finished most of them.
All of them.
So I, you know, everything from like, CMS app and, you know, CRM and just a lot of generic things, but I had no direction.
And it was just like, really, at that time, it was just based off of what I saw other people paying for and thinking, oh, I can build that and sell that.
So, yeah, I don't know if it was a good or bad thing that I never finished those and launched those, but maybe it would have been a good thing.
Right?
It would have been the lesson.
I think it wouldn't have gone very well with the approach that I was taking at the time, but it would have been a learning experience.
Omer (13:23.820)
Okay, so you've got this idea.
Tell me the specific steps you took to start turning that idea into a product and business.
Ruben (13:33.020)
So the very first thing that I did was put up a landing page and start a blog.
So my thought process there was that I wanted to.
Well, there were a few things that were going on there.
First.
I wanted.
I was reading up about marketing and SEO and stuff, and I wanted to test out some of these things that I was reading to see if it was.
It would work like it's supposed to.
Right.
Totally had no experience whatsoever.
The other thing was that I learned at that point that instead of writing code first, I should start with marketing and sort of, you know, assess the need for the product and all that stuff.
So I thought, okay, before I just written code and.
Right.
And never launched and never did anything on the marketing side.
So this time I'll do it differently.
I like the thought process here and I'll try this out.
So I started off a blog and, you know, wrote a few posts focusing on some keywords to see if those generated a little bit of traffic.
Surprisingly, they did.
And people got.
I started to get people signing up to the landing page, and with some of those people, I got into conversations about the product and stuff.
The interesting thing about that is that actually, so if I were to do it again, I would have emailed them.
Right.
But I didn't do that.
They actually emailed me once they received their welcome email.
And all that stuff.
So, yeah, that was the very, very first thing that I did.
And then I actually started writing all the code myself for the product.
Eventually, after a few months of that, I scrapped all the code and then started over again.
But by outsourcing a lot of the development instead, because I was trying to do marketing and development and I was trying to do stuff with SEO.
I was trying to do a little bit more research on the customer side.
There were a lot of things going on there and I had a full time job and I didn't have a lot of time to do it.
Omer (15:58.040)
So you hired somebody else to build the product and you focus your time on the marketing and you were doing all of this over evenings and weekends while you had the full time job, right?
Ruben (16:10.120)
I was still doing a little bit of the development.
They were doing most of it at that time.
And then I didn't have a lot of money, so there was a time where I just ran out of money and I had to pick up and do the rest of the development.
The other thing that I was doing here was I was doing a lot of experimenting and learning.
So for me it was like I'd met Rob Walling.
He's an entrepreneur that has a lot of products and written books, podcasts, and he's done a lot of stuff.
And at that time, I remember discovering a post where he talked about doing an acquisition of a small product.
I thought that was really cool.
And he had some other content out there.
I don't remember if it was through his content or through conversations with him, through email, that I learned about him outsourcing stuff.
I thought, wow, this is really neat and I wanted to try it myself.
So all of this stuff was both going to help me build a product faster, but I also wanted to get experience doing it.
And I felt like even if I wasn't very good, which I probably wouldn't be because it was my first time doing it, I get better at it right now.
Omer (17:26.579)
How long did it take you to build that first product?
The first version of Bit Sketch?
Ruben (17:32.059)
So it went several months when I was doing it myself and traction was really slow.
And like I said, I just scrapped that and changed my approach, changed the language to make it easier to outsource and then start it over again.
And once I started over again, it took about four months to get to the beta.
Omer (17:54.590)
And that's after you hired someone to help with the development.
Ruben (17:57.550)
Right.
And then they did.
It's tough to say how much development they did, but let's say like 50 to 60, you know, maybe 70% at the upper limit.
And I did the rest.
Omer (18:14.190)
Now these days when I look at the Bidsketch blog, you seem to have a lot of contributors posting content there.
But a few years back, I can remember most of that content used to be written by you.
Did that come naturally to you, writing that type of content and doing it pretty consistently?
Ruben (18:39.460)
No, I don't like to write.
It takes forever for me to write.
So that was another thing, right?
Like when I was working with a limited amount of time and I was doing this nights and weekends, I'm sitting there at night after a full day of work, I'm not, you know, pretty drained, not thinking right maybe.
And then I have to just come up with fresh content.
That's pretty good.
That was not easy.
I did it.
I can do it, so I'll do it from time to time, but I don't enjoy doing it either.
So it was a really easy decision for me to just outsource that.
Omer (19:23.900)
Did you try any other marketing tactics to get traffic to your landing page?
Ruben (19:29.820)
Yeah, let's see.
So we had the blog and then a lot of it was SEO related, right?
So it was writing about just topics that people would be interested in, writing how to sort of posts which were pretty good.
Also proposal templates.
So I did that early traffic that I identified.
They were mostly looking for templates.
So I said, okay, well let me, let's give them those templates and then, you know, ask them to opt in to get them.
That worked pretty well.
Also another thing, especially in the earliest days, right when I launched, what was really good was emailing.
I emailed, I don't remember how many 30 something bloggers and people and asked them to review my product and write about it.
It's kind of interesting to think about how I was emailing them back then.
I would totally do it differently nowadays.
But it worked.
It just, you know, it didn't.
It was a little depressing emailing so many people and not getting any answers.
Like hardly anybody would reply back.
But then slowly over time, a couple of people would reply back or they wouldn't even reply back.
There would just be a review or write up about my product on their blog.
And that actually made quite a bit of difference on the, you know, the early days.
Getting some good traffic.
Omer (21:14.310)
Now.
You wrote one particular blog post on the number of times you failed to get traction and almost gave up on your way to your first thousand dollars in monthly recurring revenue.
I thought that was a really powerful post.
It's great to hear stories about people or companies succeeding.
But the most valuable lessons often lie in those challenges that they faced along the way.
So can you share with our audience some more about those challenges and what you wrote in that post?
Ruben (21:46.210)
Sure.
So, I mean, there were a lot of challenges even before I launched the product, right?
There were a lot of things.
There are a lot of chances for you to give up, like, even before you kind of get started.
Because launching the product I think of as you're just getting started, even if you've been doing marketing the whole time.
So, for example, before the product.
Before the product was live and before it was, you know, while it was getting built, like I said, I outsourced development.
So it sounds really easy and good to say.
Yeah, well, I hired a developer and I outsourced about 50% of the development, and then I picked it up after that point.
But it wasn't that straightforward.
It wasn't that straightforward and easy.
I fired, like, three developers during that process, right?
Like, one of the developers that I hired seemed really good.
Like, I didn't know what to expect.
I didn't know what I was doing.
But I thought, I'll try this and I'll learn.
So I hired a developer, I interviewed them.
Then the day starts and they start working, and it's like, wait a minute, this isn't the same person that I hired, but I think the name was the same.
So the agency that I went through was trying to pass off the, you know, this person for that person, and the quality was way different, Right?
So then I was, you know, obviously angry at that point.
I told them, they tried to fix it, and I said, okay, sure, I'll give this other new person a chance.
And so there was a lot of stuff going on on the development side and with outsourcing, a lot of mistakes that I was making.
Omer (23:29.930)
Now, one thing you wrote in that blog post was you'd built this free tool and that you found.
I remember you writing in there that, you know, you didn't have success with that tool.
And you said to yourself, if I can't convince people to use a free tool, how am I going to get people to pay for a product?
Ruben (23:50.630)
Right?
So that was another thing where I thought, okay, well, cool, I know how.
Right.
I was trying to think of ways to get more traffic and get more people to sign up to my email list.
And I thought, I'll just build a free estimate tool that they'll punch in the number of hours, they'll punch in their hourly rate, and it'll list some predefined tasks and then they'll just calculate the total and they can send this off to a client or something like that and they'll be just a perfect lead in to my proposal tool.
So I spent I don't know how much time, like a month and a half building it.
And this is valuable time where I could have been doing something else that worked.
So in this case I spent good amount of time building this tool.
Then I sent, I, you know, went to a couple of forums and emailed a couple people and told them, hey, there's this free tool that I built, right?
And then I got a little, I got a few visits like the day that I launched it, a couple days after that, you know, and then it just went down to like zero to one visits a day.
And yeah, I was floored.
I thought, I thought it was, it's free, it's valuable, it's going to work, people are going to love it, I'm going to get a lot of traffic from it, it's gonna be great.
Then holy crap, this, you know, I mean, it just didn't work, it didn't do anything.
I mean I would do it differently nowadays, but at that point I just thought, well, exactly that, right?
Like this is a free product, I'm giving it away.
And how am I going to build something that people are going to pay for if, you know, and how am I going to make that work if this free tool, you know, doesn't even track, attract anybody?
Omer (25:41.670)
How would you do it differently if you were doing it today?
Ruben (25:45.430)
So today I know that it doesn't matter if it's free or paid, you're going to have to promote it like a product, right?
So if you can't just depend on these one time events, right?
So I build this tool and then I email a bunch of people and then let's say they write about it or they introduce it to their audience, then what?
Like where's the rest of the ongoing traffic?
So maybe you can get a spike, but then it's going to die down.
So nowadays I would rely on, I would try to piggyback on, you know, on existing streams of traffic or sources of traffic, right?
To where, let's say it's just part of somebody else's tool set or do some sort of partnership, basically try to get a steady stream of traffic going to this free tool.
It's really hard to just create a free tool and have it go viral and then all of a sudden it's just by itself creating all these things.
Another approach would be, you know, I launched a tool and then I promote it just like a product.
I go, I write a bunch of blog guest posts.
I do, you know, some content to get people in there through, through organic search, things like that, just to get that steady flow of traffic.
Omer (27:10.750)
So it clearly wasn't smooth sailing.
You.
You faced a lot of challenges, you know, failed to get traction a lot of times, but you pushed ahead, and eventually you got to your first thousand dollars in recurring revenue.
What happened next?
How did you then grow?
Did you continue doing the same kind of marketing strategies like the blog posts or guest posts?
And at what point did you feel like this is going to.
This has the potential to turn into something serious business?
Ruben (27:46.550)
Yeah.
So I did a lot of the same stuff, but also things changed as, you know, as a product grew.
Right.
So in the earlier days, for example, in the earlier days, I depended a lot on blogs, right?
On other blogs, referral sources, to give me a lot of traffic.
And then after that phase, I really pushed a lot harder on SEO and getting more organic traffic.
I experimented with AdWords, and that did okay.
There was nothing really there, too much.
And then I started to do.
Then after that sort of phase, I focused on integrations.
I built out integrations and tried to do my best to get them to promote those and send me traffic.
That worked out pretty well for me.
Maybe the traffic wasn't as much as some of the other things that I tried, but converted at a much higher level and the customer stayed around for a longer time.
So that was a really good approach.
The other thing that I started doing was I emailed other, either blog owners or product owners that had a similar audience that I did, and basically set up these cross promotions, asked them if they'd be willing to promote my product to their audience and I'd promote their product or whatever to mine.
And those were pretty good.
Those were nice in those days.
So that was, you know, like, things changed as I got more traffic.
And also, I think Gabriel Weinberg of DuckDuckGo talks about this a lot, where basically the things that you do that have an impact in your earlier days don't have.
I mean, you'll get the same sort of impact.
You'll get the same amount of traffic and trials and all this stuff.
But because you're larger now, right, it has less of an impact on your business.
So you need to do things that are bigger to get that same sort of growth that you're looking for now.
Omer (30:04.370)
When you started out, you bootstrapped the business.
Did you ever look to bring in investors?
Ruben (30:11.370)
No, it was a really small business.
And the initial goal was really.
I mean, I could say the initial goal was to quit my job.
And in a way it was, but not with my first product.
So with this product, the initial goal was just to learn how to launch a product and make money.
And then I thought.
I just thought it was too small of a business.
And I thought, I'll take what I learned here and then, you know, launch another business and make more money.
Right.
And that will be worth.
Helps me quit my job.
So that's how I was thinking about it in those days.
Omer (30:48.770)
And what point did that change for you?
Like, when did you feel that this was.
This was the business?
Ruben (30:56.690)
So a good question.
A. I, like, was pretty apparent that I could get, you know, to $1,000 a month and then $2,000 a month without any problems.
And then I thought, you know what?
I think I can continue to around, like, $2,000.
I thought I could probably.
I may be able to get to like four or $5,000.
And I was trying to think about the timing, like, how much do I need to quit my job?
Right.
And so I'd need more than that.
And how long would it take at the current growth?
So it wasn't there.
It wasn't very clear to her.
Like, it was just this one date where I thought, okay, I'm going to be this.
This is the way to go.
I just need to keep pushing it.
It was.
Yeah, I was analyzing a lot, and I was taking a very experimental approach.
So at the time, I was thinking, I think I could take it here.
So let me do a lot more marketing and let me push a lot harder and see what happens.
Then I'd get more growth and I'd say, okay, cool.
We're, you know, it's moving, it's.
But it's starting to slow down again.
Let's see, what else can I do?
How much more can I.
So it was just almost like a cycle of that over and over to where I kept hitting these different milestones and, you know, kept hitting these roadblocks to where I'd start to plateau if I didn't change something, if I didn't do something right.
And I saw each one of those as a challenge.
So after a while, I think around, yeah, around maybe $6,000 a month or so, $7,000 a month.
That's when I quit my job.
And at that point I thought, okay, I think this is the business, right?
Omer (32:51.100)
Yeah, I think I Love that.
That, you know, it's so easy to kind of get caught up and excited by the next new shiny thing.
And I love how you've kind of broken these kind of these stages down into mini milestones and sort of continued to persevere through all of these different challenges and just kept pushing ahead until you found that breakthrough.
Ruben (33:17.260)
Yeah, it wasn't easy to just stay focused on a single product.
There were a few times where I felt like I want to do something else.
And there are even a couple times where I started to do other things, like not write code or anything like that, but put up landing pages and started to register, think of names.
But each one of those times I just thought I realized, holy crap, it's a lot of work to do this all over again, first of all.
And then second of all, this is still growing and still challenging and I think I could still go further.
So what am I doing?
Right?
Like, no, stop.
Just focused on this again.
Stay focused on the product.
Great.
Omer (34:04.940)
So, Ruben, we started this conversation by going back to where the idea for bidsketch came from.
And then we took a journey together on how you turned that idea into a successful product.
Looking at the business today, can you share some numbers in terms of where the business is right now, terms of customers and revenue?
Ruben (34:21.279)
Sure.
So not so public with revenue anymore.
But I'll say that on the paying customer side, we're about 1500 paid customers.
And now it's gone from just me to there being two full time developers and a customer success person.
So three full time employees.
Omer (34:46.889)
Are those people also located in the Spokane area or do they work remotely from you?
Ruben (34:51.849)
They work remotely.
So one of them works in.
One of them is in Philadelphia.
The another one is in Texas, another one is in Portland.
And yeah, so that's it.
Then me in Spokane.
Right.
And I'll be moving to Portland.
Omer (35:10.729)
So what's the one thing in your business that you're most excited about right now?
Ruben (35:17.500)
The one thing that I'm most excited about.
So the one thing that.
The one thing that I'm most excited about is probably the one thing that scares me the most about it right now.
It's the unknown.
I have no idea how much more I can grow this or what's ahead of me right now.
It's really critical and challenging time in the business and there are a lot of different directions where I can go.
I can go up market.
Right.
Serve a totally new customer.
I can expand the product, have it be more horizontal.
They're just like endless possibilities with What I can do and none of those are wrong.
I can seek investment, I can do a lot of things and I need to do something right.
I need to.
This is time for that next step and I don't yet know which direction I'm going to go right now.
Omer (36:23.620)
Okay, so now it's time for a lightning round.
I'm going to ask you a series of questions and I'd just like you to answer them as quickly as you can.
Are you ready for that?
Ruben (36:31.700)
Sure.
Great.
Omer (36:33.770)
So what's the best piece of business advice that you ever received?
Ruben (36:40.010)
It's tough.
I've gotten a lot of great business advice, but one thing that I probably think of a lot nowadays is actually from Noel Kagan from AppSumo.
He's an advisor but also a good friend.
Talk to him.
But he has he introduced to me this concept of thinking about things in the way of the way that you frame value or what you're doing it or what you're doing for customers as you want it to be a no brainer for them.
So instead of like asking, so if you're evaluating a product idea, right, would you pay for this?
How much would you pay this much for it?
It's thinking about it differently.
It's saying what would this need to be for it to be a no brainer at this price?
You do that with anything you're emailing somebody for a partnership.
How can I turn this into a no brainer for them?
It just would be silly for them to turn it down.
Omer (37:47.420)
What book would you recommend to our audience and why?
Ruben (37:54.140)
I'd probably say stay small, Start Small, Space Small by Rob Walling.
Omer (38:00.700)
What's one attribute or characteristic of a successful entrepreneur in your mind?
Ruben (38:06.140)
Persistence.
Omer (38:09.100)
What's your favorite personal productivity tool or habit?
Ruben (38:15.820)
First thing I would say, well, I would say deliberate, deliberately ignoring things.
Right.
So first thing in the morning I deliberately ignore pretty much everything, email everything that I can because it's my time I think about, okay, what can I, what's the big win or a couple wins that I can do right now.
And I know there are all these other things, you know, that I need to reply to or need to do, but I'm going to ignore those for the next two hours and just do these things that will push me forward.
Omer (38:52.500)
If you had to start over tomorrow, what type of business would you build?
Ruben (39:00.020)
I would say maybe something in the marketing space.
Marketing or I really like marketing or sales space.
So I'm in the sales space now.
Either one of those two I really
Omer (39:12.170)
like what's an interesting or fun fact about you that most people don't know.
Ruben (39:20.490)
I never went to high school.
Omer (39:24.490)
And the last one, what is one of your most important passions outside of your work?
Ruben (39:30.970)
Really like to go hiking.
Hiking and traveling.
Omer (39:35.610)
All right, Great answers.
Thanks for that, Ruben.
Ruben (39:39.020)
Cool.
Omer (39:40.460)
So unfortunately it's time for us to wrap up.
I want to thank you for joining me today and talking about Bit Sketch.
I really appreciate you sharing your experiences and insights with our audience, and thank you for letting us get to know you a little bit better.
Personally, I've really enjoyed the chat and I'm really looking forward to seeing where you're going to go with Bit Sketch in the in the next couple of years.
So if folks want to find out more about bitsketch or they want to get in touch with you, what's the best way for them to do that?
Ruben (40:08.870)
Sure.
So they can probably Twitter's the best place.
And earthlingworks on Twitter.
Omer (40:17.830)
Awesome.
Thanks again, Ruben, and I wish you the continued success.
Ruben (40:21.670)
Well, thanks.
