Omer (00:10.000)
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 interview, I talked to Ryan Fife, the co founder and COO of WorkPulse, an employee monitoring and time tracking software.
In 2010, Ryan set out to build better employee scheduling software.
Early in his career, he'd worked in the service industry and experienced the pains of scheduling shifts both as an employee and manager.
He believed there was an opportunity to build an easier solution.
He targeted the lower end of the market and quickly built a basic scheduling app.
He didn't do any customer interviews or much market research.
Instead, he trusted his gut that based on his experience, there was a need for this solution.
But getting early customers was disheartening.
He went from being excited about how his product was going to help hundreds or maybe even thousands of small businesses to to struggling to get even 10 customers.
People seemed interested in his product, but always seemed to have an excuse for why they couldn't or weren't ready to pay for it.
And things got worse when Ryan realized that it wasn't working out with his co founder and decided to buy him out.
Suddenly he became a solo founder of a product that he believed in, but one that was clearly struggling to get traction.
And now Ryan had to do everything from product marketing and sales on his own.
But after a lot of persistence and hard work, he eventually figured out how to sell his product.
He went from having a struggling product that nobody wanted to bootstrapping it to 100k in annual recurring revenue.
And then after raising VC funding, he went on to grow the business to over $12 million in arriving 150 employees and 40,000 customers, including companies such as Nike, CNN and Lyft.
In this interview, you'll learn exactly how he did that, what mistakes he made along the way, the lessons he learned, and what he's doing differently with his latest startup.
So I hope you enjoy it.
Ryan, welcome to the show.
Ryan Fyfe (02:37.310)
Omeir.
Thank you so much for having me.
Omer (02:39.470)
So you have a quote, something that inspires or motivates you or just gets you out of bed every day that you can share with us?
Ryan Fyfe (02:45.260)
Yeah, I do.
I used to be a big quote guide.
Used to have them all around early offices.
Everyone works home, so I guess that's not as applicable.
But I was looking around or thinking through one now and I do have a quote on my wall.
Actually it's a poster, a metal poster of Harvey Specter from the show Suits, if you're familiar.
Omer (03:00.540)
Yeah, yeah.
Ryan Fyfe (03:01.340)
And the quote is, when you are backed against the wall, break the goddamn thing down.
So for me, that's about never giving up, always looking for a solution and getting excuses with problems.
Omer (03:12.460)
Awesome.
Love it.
All right, so we're going to start the story talking about your previous company, humanity, which you just sold late part of last year.
And then we'll get into what you're doing right now.
Why don't you start by just telling us about humanity, like what does the product do?
Who's it for?
What's the main problem that it's helping to solve?
Ryan Fyfe (03:35.530)
Yeah, great.
Just kind of quick comment is it was originally called shift planning in the early days and that's really the core of what humanity still does today is around employee scheduling.
But if you hear me in terms mixed humanity or shift planning, that's why.
So my, my background is ever since I was very young, I was working through all sorts of part time hourly jobs.
And so I worked at, you know, retail and then a lot at the end, food and beverage for example, at both the front and back of the house.
And that was where kind of the initial seed for the idea came from was in the restaurant industry.
There's a lot of shift changes, it's all scheduled work, a lot of part time staff.
We used to have to phone in to find out when our schedules were.
We used to have to sometimes if we wanted to change a shift.
For example, I was an athlete in school and so if I had a track meet or something that would coincide with a pre scheduled shift, I would actually have to go into the restaurant, run through the staff list of calling people.
Oftentimes you would even have to incentivize them by paying them a little bit out of your own pocket so they would take your shifts so you could keep your job.
So very inefficient.
And that's where the idea of something that was scheduling suited.
It was mobile, it involved, you know, the managers to set the schedule, communicate that easily out to employees, but then also included employees in the process, making it easy for them to set their availability, swap shifts amongst one another, et cetera.
So that's kind of where things were, were born.
And that was around 2010, 2009.
Omer (05:05.230)
Right.
So what was what was going on around that time?
Like was it just you were working in places that weren't using any technology or was there still not that many solutions around at the time?
Ryan Fyfe (05:21.370)
Yeah, it's really interesting to think back as even SaaS in 2009, like this is just at the time when kind of smartphone adoption is becoming mainstream.
Businesses are starting to think about the cloud, but there really wasn't anyone doing that actively.
And so one of the things that I first did was kind of go out and look at, okay, who's on the market, who's doing this now, what are they doing well, what aren't they doing well?
But the bigger question was like, why?
Why can I walk down the street?
Or in every single business that I've worked in, why are none of them using a tool like this now?
And so there was a number of legacy competitors that had done well, but they had a very complex product.
It required, you know, a very like sales and onboarding, intense motion.
And so that really cornered them into going after bigger chains, for example, like franchises or larger businesses.
And so when I was working at individual like kind of mom and pop SMBs or retail stores that are like individually managed things like that, those solutions were just kind of priced out of the market or just too complex to be adopted.
So that was kind of a driving point behind really focusing on a lower end, almost like very small business solution at the beginning to make it super easy to use and allow for things like self onboarding.
Omer (06:39.060)
Okay, so you've got the idea, it's come from a personal experience you had previously.
How did you get started?
Ryan Fyfe (06:46.820)
So immediately kind of out of high school, I was competing as an athlete and that's when I was working through these different jobs, kind of part time jobs, and I started learning about Internet marketing.
And so that was kind of my initial, what's called foray into working online, doing kind of search engine marketing and things like that.
And I did well with that.
And then it kind of stemmed naturally into product development.
And I had a number of product ideas that I had, I was building kind of on the side.
And when I initially started thinking about this, this humanity was the first time that I thought kind of away from things like social networking and all the sexy stuff that, you know, my friends would want to use.
And it was the first time that I thought, okay, there's a real business problem here.
People are going to pay money for this.
I could see a path to, you know, 10, 100 customers, know that there would be revenues kind of immediately from that.
And that was kind of when I got hooked.
Omer (07:42.870)
And what kind of validation did you do?
Did you do any market research?
Did you start going into restaurants and talking to people?
Like, how did you figure out whether there was enough demand and people were willing to pay for this.
Ryan Fyfe (07:57.590)
I'm a big believer in trusting your gut.
And so I guess I felt the pain on both sides of the house, like kind of as a manager, an individual employee, having worked through the places I did to sort of know the validation was there.
And I remember walking like, I remember being so excited about this, like when I, when I started kind of building it all out in my, in my mind and just walking down the street.
You know, you go through a strip mall or like past a, past a commercial center and you're like, yep, this business could use shift planning.
So could this one, so could this one, so could this one.
It was just like a blank canvas at the time.
And what was ironic though is one of the kind of early mistakes was assuming that just because every business could use the tool that they would.
And so there was probably, I would say two to three months of kind of in person pilots that we tried to run with different stores.
That was very demoralizing.
They say they would pick it up, we would come back a week later and they hadn't gotten started yet, or it was time to ask them for their credit card, but they wouldn't pay because they needed one more feature.
One more feature, one more feature.
And so that was kind of a frustrating part in the early years.
And that just kind of pushed the company just to kind of ignore, ignore, really that.
And really just go online early, kind of that lean startup model.
Just release early, get early adopters in and then build things out that way.
And that's when we really hit our stride and had a ton of success.
Omer (09:21.460)
How did you build the product?
Did you do that yourself?
Did you have a co founder?
Ryan Fyfe (09:27.220)
I did, yeah.
So I built the product myself.
I was kind of developer number one, salesperson number one, all of those, all of that stuff to get it online.
I did have an early, early partner as well in the company, but that didn't work out.
And so I ended up kind of putting the project on hold.
We came to an agreement after a few months for me to buy them out.
And that's what allowed me to continue going kind of on my own.
Omer (09:48.070)
So what did that first version of the product actually do?
Ryan Fyfe (09:51.270)
The first version of the product was super crude, as you can imagine, but I think we did hit a lot of things right.
So the first version of the product, you can kind of imagine it like an Excel where you can enter in your staff times.
But the beauty of it was that the program had the knowledge of Kind of what was behind the cell.
So rather than just, you know, numbers that could print out, it knew how to do things like send shift reminders to staff, eventually allow staff to swap their shifts amongst one another, et cetera.
So it was really scheduling focus to start and still was and is, but we also did build out things like a time clock, a learning module, a lot of kind of broader workforce management stuff around the schedule.
Omer (10:32.990)
Okay, so the story so far sounds pretty similar to many other stories that I've heard.
You have a founder come up with an idea, they're super excited about it, they get a product built and there's this kind of just excitement, right.
Like you sort of described like walking through in the mall and like, yeah, they could use it, they could use it, right?
And you're kind of building this excitement and this kind of vision of this future in your mind.
And then you get the product in front of people and it's like crickets.
Either they don't seem to care about replying to you, or they tell you the product is great, but they don't use it.
Or they have excuses like it needs to do XYZ before we would do.
And it sounds like you went through exactly that.
But at that point many people would sort of just keep doing that and feel like they're hitting the wall and, and eventually just say, you know, like that's kind of like the bubble gets burst.
Right.
It's just like maybe I was just excited about it, but it's not, there's not a real business opportunity here.
So what, what kept you going when you were going through that period when you just felt demoralized and not seeming to get that breakthrough.
Ryan Fyfe (11:48.940)
Yeah, I guess as a founder you're probably a little bit stubborn and opinionated on where you see a product or market or different things going on and that's what gets you started and hopefully keeps you going.
But I think you also have to really balance that out with, you know, what the market is telling you.
And so that was kind of one of the early lessons that I learned is really building that feed loop into the business and kind of into myself as well as kind of like an individual, especially as a first time founder, like you're your own product, you're trying to push yourself as the company is growing the same way that your, your company is as it's scaling.
The actual ironic, or I guess not ironic, but the connection to sort of the change in strategy was really tied to the initial partner that I had in the business.
The way that we had thought was best to divide the business up and our responsibilities as Ryan was the product and engineering guy and he was going to be the sales, marketing, go to market guy.
And so it was really the two of us kind of bumping heads around that as we just weren't getting the traction that we were looking for is we didn't have a mature product like you mentioned.
And I think when you try to shop a product into a store, most of those people aren't going to be your passionate early adopters, which you really need to grab a hold, see the vision and help provide you, like, help get that feedback loop moving.
And so it was after we parted ways that I was able to just quickly launch online the first version of the product.
I actually launched for free before I started monetizing it.
Was able to get a lot of kind of press and traction and early adopters that way.
And actually our first paying customer ended up becoming an investor in the business, which was.
Which was always a super cool story.
So interesting.
Omer (13:30.540)
Yeah.
And because I think when people are at that stage, there's like so many unknowns, right.
In terms of, is it my product?
Am I really missing some core functionality here?
Or are people just telling me that because it'll.
It's.
They can get rid of me by telling me that, you know, the product doesn't do this, or am I focusing on the wrong market?
Or is my message not quite right here and that's why they're not paying attention?
But it sounds like from what you just said it, there was definitely some.
Some things missing in the product.
And so how did you figure out what that was?
Because it's easy to come up with like a list of things that you could go and build for the next three years.
Right.
So how did you figure out, like this.
These are the things that if I get in there, I feel confident I can close some sales.
Ryan Fyfe (14:23.510)
Yeah.
So I think you're right.
It's easy to.
Especially if I think for founders, it's super easy to be a dreamer.
You're a product guy, you have a million ideas, some things that your customers are asking for, hopefully a lot of things that they're not.
And that's kind of like the vision of where the product and the company are going.
I think how you get there, though, is kind of a balance between staying true to your roadmap, but also being very flexible to what the market is telling you.
And keep in mind that when I started this 2009 and then kind of really getting steam in 2010, like this was the one.
There really wasn't the tool stack or the infrastructure that you founders have today when they're starting something.
Customer support software, product feedback software, product analytics, revenue analytics, all this tool stack that we have now to just kind of move super quick on our core business didn't exist back then, so we had to be a lot more intentional about collecting that and building those systems up.
Whereas now I think implementing tools like Intercom or whatever it is can help you keep a very close and tight feedback loop so that you can start making those decisions very early on based on kind of what the market is telling you, whether that's through kind of proactively running a B tests or things that are a little bit more reactionary based on customer feedback, customer requests, those types of things.
Omer (15:48.740)
And in the early days, how were you getting that feedback?
Was that mostly by talking to prospects or did you have enough going on online to be able to sort of track behavior?
Ryan Fyfe (16:05.090)
Yeah, it was a combination of things.
We were lucky that we had very active and kind of vocal customers early on and we spent a lot of time harvesting that as well.
So we actually implemented forum software and we had our customers all engaged.
The moment you signed up for our product, an account was created in this customer community for you.
And that's where we would share things like product ideas.
We would allow them to provide feedback, request things, vote on others ideas and things like that.
So that was something.
That's an example of something that was very effective at ensuring that we stayed close to them and their ideas.
To you.
Omer (16:39.180)
Okay.
Yeah.
So you've gone from a founding team to a solo founder.
So was it just you or did you have any help in those early days?
Ryan Fyfe (16:49.970)
It was just me in terms of the very beginning that I was working closely with the designer actually who still works at the company.
He's worked there longer than I have now, as have a number of people, which is super cool.
And then the first individuals that I went out to hire was a remote 247 support team.
I really believed in products having an amazing customer experience and they acted as kind of part sales, part success and, and support.
And that kind of ties again back into.
It was super easy for our customers to get in touch with us.
And so they did.
And that made a very fast feedback loop into where things were going wrong and what were the types of needs that they have.
So it started out that way.
And then immediately after getting some support on the customer facing side, I put a job ad out to hire my first engineer and then around them.
We ended up building a team, you know, pretty quickly afterwards.
So I was able to start stepping back from the product development stuff as well.
Omer (17:47.170)
Now you, you bootstrapped this business to get to your first couple of hundred customers?
Ryan Fyfe (17:55.490)
I did, yep.
The initial product, like I mentioned, came online with essentially like a free freemium model.
And then after a few months of doing that and getting kind of, I think, the confidence up to stop charging, we implemented a billing plan where customers were paying again, very, very cheap.
I think it's easy as first time founder to not have a lot of confidence to ask people for money.
I'm seeing that again in our current customer.
Sorry, the second business that I'm part of, the kind of need to say yes, excessively discount and those types of things.
So went through all of that the first time before.
We ended up kind of positioning ourselves as the premium player in the market, which was the fantastic move.
I wish we had made it sooner, but yes, after we had reached first few hundred paying customers wasn't really fundraising.
I was following TechCrunch and a lot of stuff and probably in the back of my mind was dreaming about that or thought it was the right thing to do.
But a fantastic investor actually reached out to me after seeing some product reviews and some press that we had received.
And then that's kind of where I got started on a fundraising pass.
We raised a very small seed round, especially in 2021 terms, and after that had both, you know, a fantastic investor and board member that was able to help kind of guide the rest of the journey.
Omer (19:14.810)
So you bootstrapped the business up to.
Yeah, I know we talked about this earlier.
It was kind of a ballpark number, but around 10k mrr was kind of your estimate.
Then you raised the seed round and eventually you grew this business to doing what in terms of revenue?
Ryan Fyfe (19:36.270)
Personally, I saw the business as CEO through to about 10 million in revenue, and then I handed it off to somebody that had kind of come up from within the team.
To be honest, by the time I handed it off, he was already running the company.
So I was like, what am I doing here?
We had the conversation like, you don't need me.
And I handed things off about two years ago and that was about a year and a half prior to us, you know, having an incoming offer and selling the business.
Omer (20:03.080)
Yeah, yeah, and I want to, I want to talk about that because there's.
We had a good chat about that previously and I think there's some good, good lessons there for a lot of people in terms of being more self aware.
But before we get into that.
So, okay, so in the early days, you're building the product, you're having to do basically the marketing as well.
And so what, what did you do to get these first couple of hundred customers?
What, what kind of marketing was going on?
Ryan Fyfe (20:33.370)
Yeah, I think the first ten hundred are the hardest.
And I think to get those, you, you as the founder or the founding team need to be scrappy and do a lot of things that are kind of not scalable longer term.
And so the stuff that I really focused on at the time was a lot of search engine organic kind of content marketing.
And that's, I think, I guess always my first recommendation to companies is, you know, building that online presence.
It's slow to get the ball moving, but it just creates this fantastic foundation later on.
And then I think one of the things that actually came as a result of me just trying to be a link building is a lot of the sites that I was trying to build links on at the time were the SaaS review sites.
And they were just like SaaS business application review sites.
And at that time they were just starting themselves.
And so they were, you know, they didn't charge money.
They maybe had hundreds of listings, not tens of thousands.
And they were happy to feature new products that were in new categories.
And so that kind of came almost by chance that I was able to get a lot of coverage on a lot of those sites.
So people that were out researching for.
I think it's the number one way people are researching for this stuff now is, you know, through Google search, but also really relying a lot on reviews like we all do when making buying decisions back then.
That was still very early days.
You know, GetApp, G2 Crowd, all Capterra, all these sites were just still quite in their infancy as well.
And so that was kind of part of what moved the needle.
Omer (22:02.050)
Do you think those are still a good place to kind of focus on if you're in the early stages of trying to get traction?
Ryan Fyfe (22:11.890)
You have to, you have to play the game.
I hate the game, personally.
I think it's just kind of such a misleading process where you've got, you know, these review sites that are kind of putting their hands in both cookie jars, not fully transparent about what's going on.
We're paying them, so we rank, et cetera, et cetera.
I should be careful what I'm saying, but I absolutely do think it is right if, you know, the top, like Google is doing this intentionally.
The in the top listing page you'll see kind of for every core product category, they're going to rotate in two or three of their top 10 spots.
For the top review sites, it's almost like two rankings that are happening.
One for the organic products themselves and then the other one is for the ranking sites.
And so, you know, if three of the top 10 are for, you know, XYZ review website, you also want to make sure that you're well reviewed on that second site as well.
So you definitely have to play in both, in both ponds.
Omer (23:02.640)
All right, so, so in terms of SEO, like, what exactly were you doing there?
Was it just like figuring out, here's a bunch of keywords that I'm going to target and then just making sure that you're optimized.
You did the on page optimization for that?
Were you doing a bunch of content to create more sort of top of the funnel blog posts or articles for people?
What was the approach that you took there?
Ryan Fyfe (23:28.880)
Yeah, so the approach that I took then is very different than what we're taking now or what I could recommend now.
Back then it was still kind of the wild west west where and I'd actually just come out of, like I mentioned doing Internet marketing prior to this, which was really just SEO, really optimizing for specific words and then being able to market products or sell ad space after that.
So I was well suited for this, I guess, during the early days.
And so we were doing kind of some stuff now that would be considered like black hat, like link insertion, link buying, building link wheels, all of the type of stuff that you wouldn't want, want to do today.
And over time, you know, we cleaned and removed all of that.
But then there was a lot of other stuff that I guess at the time I didn't really know what it was called, but it was kind of, you know, early pr.
So by reaching out to different sites and trying to go for coverage and different things like that to content and thought leadership.
So I was publishing a lot of content myself every time we would release a new product or we had a new product idea or we talked kind of about where we thought the employee scheduling space was going and those types of things.
And so all of that content itself created just a huge trove of keyword dense content that did very well.
So.
Omer (24:40.760)
Okay, great.
So you mentioned earlier that I mean, this stuff does take time to kick in, but focusing on getting started with some type of SEO for most businesses is probably a smart thing to do.
Sooner the better.
Ryan Fyfe (24:56.990)
Absolutely.
It can be kind of demoralizing, especially when you're starting off and there's some, you know, entrenched or even just like one or two year old competitors that have had that time to already start their thing going.
But I think, you know, the, the worst thing you can do is delay.
And so what we do is we set, for example, some goals.
Now it's just like, well, if we get one new review per week or per month or whatever, that, that's, that cadence is we know that at least we're not falling, falling behind and that over time we can see those things kind of compounding and they'll, they'll accelerate as the business does as well.
So it's just setting targets and staying at it.
If not, you're never going to catch up and you'll just be constantly falling further behind.
Omer (25:35.570)
So from the point where you started doing the SEO, like roughly how long did it take before it became your primary driver of new leads again because
Ryan Fyfe (25:48.400)
of the like, because this was 10 years ago, it was very fast.
You know, within two to three months we were ranking quite well.
And then we're able to continue to grow and sort of maintain that lead as well as extend out on a lot of the initial terms that we had.
So our best terms were things like employee scheduling software, online employee scheduling software, you know, very core to the products.
But then over time we were also able to rank for lateral products and workflow, force management, you know, an increasing number of long tail terms and things like that.
Today that's, you know, just not the reality.
And so I think it's imperative that you start.
But you can't be relying on organic.
Within a few months you might be, you know, looking at a year plus before you're going to start, kind of seeing those investments pay off.
Omer (26:35.500)
Yeah, yeah.
And I think one of the mistakes I've seen people make is that they start doing SEO and then sort of get some results and then sort of just leave it and move on to something else.
Ryan Fyfe (26:48.650)
I did that.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Well, I think, I thought what I thought you were going to say though, and I see this way too often with other companies that I've been networked with, is they almost put it off way too late and they think they need to stay in quote unquote, stealth mode and you know, just have a simple landing page up and they're going to do everything through their pilot group and then go big after that.
I'm like, well, why?
I can't think of many.
You know, there's very few use cases where remaining in stealth is A good thing.
And so the faster that you get that website, that brand, that content and those wheels moving, just always, always better.
So yeah.
Omer (27:24.090)
Okay, so you kind of starting to, you know, slowly grow this online funnel to, to attract leads.
You've been focusing on the product and listening to the market and trying to improve that.
I'm kind of curious about, once you switched from a completely free product and you added a paid plan, how well or poorly did that do when you got started with that?
Ryan Fyfe (27:51.690)
It went incredibly well.
And again, it was one of those things that I had to kind of keep learning at humanity and I'm not doing that again.
The second time is I was always sort of on the cautious edge about, you know, are we charging too much?
Do we always need to be like I always thought we needed to be the most cost effective solution on the market.
All of those types of things which just kind of came, I think from a lack of confidence or experience and really, and in some cases as well a lack of understanding of like what were the most profitable deals and segments that we were in.
And it was actually the, the person that's still running the business today that, that ended up growing up that really introduced me to what is now kind of embarrassing, but the idea of really, really segmenting the business.
So you know, we always segmented leads to go after with our sales team, potentially bigger deals or the ones that were more engaged.
But when we really said when we did the same thing to our customer base and our revenues, it was just eye opening to think that potentially the majority of our customers were driving a small minority of our revenues, but eating up exponentially more resources and those types of things.
And so once I was able to see the data, we had the confidence to do a number of things.
We just started treating our customers differently.
We immediately raised pricing again to become one of the most expensive on the market.
And we also introduced a price minimum so that we kind of weeded out the very small businesses.
You know, three people at a mom and pop shop versus 10 to 20 or multi location or more enterprise, which is where we ended off.
And I wish I had made those decisions faster and had the confidence to do them.
Omer (29:33.260)
Yeah, like at what point did you do that?
Like, was that in the end of the first year, five years later?
Like when did you start doing this?
Ryan Fyfe (29:41.500)
It was five years too later?
Yeah, it was pretty late stage.
I didn't have the finance background.
I'd sort of over time started to get a little bit disconnected from even some of our core metrics and things.
Like that as different people started coming in and then having someone with the finance background and you know, very analytical, sort of cleaned all of that back up, brought a lot of this stuff to light again so we could see and then start making some of those decisions.
So it was, I would say, yeah, mid flight, you know, year five or six of the company.
Omer (30:11.990)
So what I'm hearing is you basically went through and you said, okay, let's look at all the customers, customers we have, let's figure out how we can put them into different buckets of types of customers.
And I don't know how you segmented them, but maybe it was based on things like size of company or location or whatever.
And then you were trying to figure out, okay, how much revenue are these people generating, what does it cost to acquire these customers?
All that sort of stuff.
Ryan Fyfe (30:36.050)
Essentially yes.
And I didn't implement this.
That was Chris.
So hats off to Chris for this because it was kind of one of the key things that really helped get the business moving, become a lot more, you know, efficient and, and growing faster.
And it was implemented, he implemented a, a quad system.
So we had quad quads one through four.
One being small business that will always stay small business, two being medium that has the opportunity to grow, etc.
And so we kind of had this quadrant system about where we were focusing different types of resources.
And at the end we were really focused on moving up market, going after bigger, more sophisticated deals.
And so it was a combination of, you know, which quadrants had the opportunity to expand with us as land and expand was very, a very strong motion for us.
And so that's where we focused a lot of our client success materials on whereas or resources on whereas for you know, small business that's always going to stay small.
We tried to automate and move as much of that to self service as possible.
And then from a new business perspective it was really going after the enterprise which was that highest quad and your
Omer (31:45.260)
existing customers that were on kind of not necessarily what you wanted to invest in the future.
Did you grandfather them into the pricing that they were paying or did you increase prices for everyone, including existing customers?
Ryan Fyfe (31:59.300)
So as a policy we always grandfathered everyone historically and then I know more recently they have started going back over some of the older customer segments and increasing pricing as well.
Especially I think best practice is always grandfather and then best in class is you don't always.
And this is again a lesson I learned is we built a significant amount of product after let's say month one when the product launched There was an MVP out there.
And I think there's a certain point where you get the product to finished and you're able to compete in your market segment with that baseline version of the products.
And so while I believe that you should grandfather and respect your earliest customers, that doesn't mean you have to give them every product and feature that you release after that.
So you can do things like implement pro plans, add ons, the enterprise tier, those types of things.
And that's one thing that we're doing early now at work Pulse, which we didn't have the opportunity to really do at humanity, which would have introduced a lot more kind of flywheel effects that we could have got from revenue expansion on our existing customer base.
Omer (33:05.430)
So you mentioned this briefly when you said that at some point you were kind of stepping away from the CEO type role.
And I think that you and I had a good chat about just being kind of more self aware and getting, I guess, being honest with yourself in terms of where are the things that the work that you do that energizes you the most or you're most naturally a good fit for.
So what happened there and what was it that you learned from that experience?
Ryan Fyfe (33:41.910)
Yeah, it ties back in almost all the way to kind of the co founder fallout, which is that I think not everyone's a good founder.
And the partnership that we had at that time just wasn't working out in terms of expectations, time commitment.
And so it's super risky having like a 5050 divide when those types of things aren't aligned.
There's a lot better and knowing ways to split the pie or those types of models now.
But then I think the second thing that you're talking about now is that not every founder is a good operator or someone that's good to scale the business.
And that was me in a nutshell.
I didn't have the experience and you know, maybe even more importantly I didn't enjoy it and it showed to the business.
So you know, once things became once I got a little bit too hands off, I tend to disengage.
So I like seeing the pieces, kind of seeing them directly and being able to move them around.
But when I'm working through potentially multiple people, that kind of naturally disengages me.
And then one of the kind of fatal things with the business is I was way too late to hire executives.
I didn't know what they looked like even once we'd found them or the board had helped me find them.
I didn't know how to manage Them and so it was just kind of a few years of sort of disastrous hiring to kind of get in the types of people that we needed to be able to take the business from.
Kind of something that worked incredibly well as a startup.
The first few years or several years worked very well, great product market fit, very fantastic funnel.
But operationally and internally things were a little bit of a mess and I was kind of at the center of that.
Omer (35:16.420)
So yeah, I mean I think those are great insights and I think it is important to, as I mentioned earlier, like for us all to be more self aware and to sort of figure out what are the things that we do best and energize us the most and how we can spend more time there.
And you have a, you have I guess a technique or a hack that you now use to keep yourself more grounded and aware of what's going on, right?
Ryan Fyfe (35:46.920)
Yeah, so I mean I'm a different person the second time around.
Part of that's just being older, a little bit more mature, having gone through a lot of this and then I'm in a different role sort of joining, I've joined essentially my longtime good friend, his startup and I feel like my role is not there to kind of be the operational component that I was missing at my first startup.
And so that's really what keeps me going every day.
Kind of alluding back to that question like what wakes you up every day?
It's like I'm really there for him as well as being able to be able to do some of these things or kind of have a second run.
But one of the tricks that I used early on and what I recommend is at the end it's easy to get lost in the day to day problem solving of a startup.
There's always, always something that is urgent, high priority needed to be done yesterday.
X customer is going to sign if you, if you finish this feature, those types of things.
But it's if, if you get lost in that pattern for too long, you lose sight I think on what the bigger picture is and how you build something that's really scalable.
And so one of the techniques that I've used is do a weekly recap and you can build a framework around what that looks like.
It's kind of like a weekly journal I guess.
So ask yourself questions like where did you spend your time?
And try to divide it into meaningful buckets.
And if you schedule stuff that can become easier but the ad hoc stuff that can often over encroach on things makes it harder.
But so where did you spend your time?
Where did you spend time on things that you didn't enjoy?
What things did you spend time on?
Now, in hindsight, had potentially poor business return on investment, where did you spend your time on things that you could have delegated and if you didn't delegate, why not?
Do you not have the person, et cetera?
And then how much time did you spend on recruiting and mentoring your staff?
So there's a number of questions you can sort of build into your framework but then close it off with like, how am I going to spend my time differently for the week ahead and be a bit more intentional about trying to schedule what those blocks are so you can kind of see, stay in tune and then reflect again and continue to iterate on that?
Omer (37:49.270)
Yeah, those are great questions.
And I think it's just, I guess it's just like a kind of like journaling and reflecting.
I would say even just tracking your time can be a really eye opening experience.
I went through this some time back where, you know, I was really reluctant to track my time.
It's like, ah, what's, you know, it just feels like a whole bunch of, you know, wasted effort tracking what I did for 15 minutes and.
But someone had me go through this exercise where it was like, okay, think about like what are the buckets that you should be spending your time.
Okay, really to be successful in your role and how much of your time should you be spending in there in terms of, okay, if it's a strategy piece, maybe I should be spending 20% of my time there.
If it's, you know, leading or coaching people, I should be spending X percentage of my time there.
And then I went through and tracked that time for a couple of weeks against those buckets and I realized the way that I thought I should be spending my time was completely different to the way I was actually spending my time.
And that on its own was really, like I said, eye opening because if I hadn't gone through that I would have been like, yeah, of course I'm
Ryan Fyfe (38:56.570)
doing all the right things for sure.
Yeah, no, I've had that same experience and there is no perfect.
It's kind of constantly evolving.
So I'm absolutely still doing the same thing now.
We can always get better at it.
So that's where having some sort of a framework, I think where you're measuring things or reflecting on them on set milestones, just kind of helps you continue to calibrate because those things will change over time.
As a startup, in the early days, fixing problems yourself or Being hands on with stuff is where you do spend the most of your time.
But over time that becomes more about recruiting, mentoring, doing a lot of different activities.
So it has to be an evolving framework.
Omer (39:36.720)
Yeah, yeah, I agree.
So let's talk about the acquisition quickly.
So like, how did that come about?
Like, did you and the board sort of decide, okay, we're going to go ahead and, you know, find a buyer or did you guys get approached?
How did that happen?
Ryan Fyfe (39:51.360)
Yeah, so just want to precede in advance.
There's some things that I wish I could talk more about, but we're still kind of in process with kind of the closing and an earn out period.
So I'll try to share as much as I can.
Omer (40:02.650)
Yep, fair enough.
Ryan Fyfe (40:03.370)
And maybe there'll be a later opportunity.
The offer that ended up being the, for the acquisition of the business did come inbound.
And over the years we'd had a number of inbound offers.
I think my personal appetite was there to exit the company.
I had fully stepped back.
I had essentially no liquidity leading up to it.
And that's, you know, pretty hard spot to be in after investing 10 years of my life, essentially my entire professional career was all of that value was tied up into a single private stock.
And so learning from that diversification and a lot of things I would have done differently along the way, but the reality was that the business was doing well.
We had a fantastic operator in place and our core investors didn't want to sell.
And so I was part of that and agreed long term it would hopefully work out for something a lot better.
And then Covid hit and kind of changed a lot of stuff very quickly for everyone, including our segments.
So we went from having, you know, well, 100% of our, the employees that we had on the platform were scheduled and you know, over a week or over month, like 50% less, a drop in scheduling.
And so the inbound offer came at that time and it took us.
It was heart wrenching to be honest, because it's like, well, we think the world's going to bounce back, but what's going to happen if the market stays down like this for, for longer, etc.
And so it was kind of the timing of it where we ultimately came to the right price, the right, the right buyer and things like that to be able to get the deal done.
Omer (41:37.550)
Okay, well, we'll, we'll leave it there and I'll invite you back sometime in the future and we'll talk more about that experience.
So let's go on to your current company, WorkPulse.
So you've been involved with WorkPulse pretty much from the start, but you joined as a late co founder, right?
Ryan Fyfe (41:58.520)
Yeah, I don't like to consider myself a co founder.
My good friend, the founder, calls me that, so I guess I'll tag it on here.
So the reality is that we've known each other for several years.
He actually worked for a short time at Humanity, and I became kind of a good friend, a mentor to him and so was involved with the company for the last several years from that perspective as an advisor and as his friend, really more than anything.
And then again, when Covid hit their business, started taking off, Workpaw started taking off incredibly well.
And there was kind of an instant need to inject, I think, some operational capacity, some go to market capacity, those types of things.
So there was a good fit for me to join full time, which I did then and then also have joined now and led a couple of the previous investing rounds.
So sort of on both sides of the fence this time as well, which is a fun experience.
Omer (42:50.120)
Cool.
So just tell us about Work Pulse.
So what does the product do?
Who's it for?
What's the main problem it solves?
Ryan Fyfe (42:57.800)
Yeah, so Work Pulse is a productivity and analytics tool that helps businesses really understand where their time's going.
So I guess I kind of said that I was going to segue that from your last comment around understanding where our individual time is going.
And it can do that as well.
It can help an individual analyze, you know, where are they spending their time on the computer during the day.
But really our core customers are larger businesses that were sort of thrown into the mix of having no clue how to manage remote staff or figure out productivity and a remote first or a hybrid.
Hybrid world that Covid has accelerated.
And so the core problem that we're helping them with is time and attendance, accurate time and attendance, and then being able to sort of peel back layers around understanding when are staff most productive, when do they have the best focus times, which tools are they using, which routine processes are they completing?
And then even things like around staff wellness, you know, are staff working too much from home or are these things going to lead to burnout?
How does work from home compared to work at the office and those types of things?
Omer (44:04.880)
Yeah, no, because when I, when I first looked at Work Pulse, I was like, you know, the whole idea of like employee monitoring, like, for me was
Ryan Fyfe (44:13.240)
like, I know it's hard for me still.
Yeah, I know.
Yeah.
Omer (44:19.520)
And I think that I don't know exactly what's going on with people working remotely.
But I do read things where they're saying, well, people aren't actually more productive remotely, they're just working longer hours.
And sometimes people are, they feel like, you know, because they're not in the office, they need to be spending more time just doing stuff.
Right.
So I'm.
It'd be interesting to see because, you know, a lot of startups have been doing remote work for some time and so they've had many years to figure this stuff out and still figuring it out.
But over the last year it's been like it's been thrown on so many companies that never thought they were going to have a remote workforce anytime soon.
And so I'm kind of really curious to know how that plays out both in terms of running a business, but also for just people's well being and kind of mental health and stuff like that.
So I'm glad you talked about some of that that you're trying to tackle that side of it as well.
And it's not just about are people sitting in front of a computer and doing stuff.
Ryan Fyfe (45:31.420)
For sure.
I think like any tool, I guess it can be used for good or for bad.
And so part of why I was hesitant to join at the beginning was, okay, I don't personally agree that we should be quote unquote, spying or trying to catch people cheating on company time, like stealing time to essentially that element of it.
And so we've implemented a lot of stuff that I'm actually really proud of, you know, being standing behind staff productivity, being able to start and stop what our program is doing and kind of control and limit it to find that balance between company awareness, productivity analytics, all the cool stuff that we can do in the right way while also standing by staff privacy, for example.
On the other hand.
And look, I think all businesses are kind of, if I sum it up, we're in the business of providing some product or service, we want to be more efficient, build more of them, et cetera.
And human capital is the biggest component that we have around that.
And so when we're in the office there is this, I would say it's almost a false sense.
Look, I've worked in now a number of different offices that I was the founder of, where I've been kind of unproud to see how unproductive or kind of how much abuse on company time or those types of things is happening.
Or even if it's not kind of intentional abuse, it's just for me, I always loathed open office spaces, just non stop distractions.
And now we've just moved those distractions to an online chat room like Slack.
It's just kind of nonstop all day long notifications coming from everywhere.
And so I think that's where a tool like Work Pulse can really help analyze that and help businesses understand for the first time whether they're in the office or remote, but especially when they're remote because like you mentioned, most companies had essentially zero experience with that before the pandemic and then were essentially forced to think about it overnight.
Omer (47:21.730)
Yeah, yeah, no, I think hearing you talk about that.
So I think that with a product like this there's going to be reactions.
Like the reaction I had when we said, well, it kind of monitors people or spies on people.
And knowing that, I think having got to know you and your kind of mindset and mentality around this, hopefully tools like this, there's an opportunity to turn them into being of some value to do some good as well.
But yeah, it still makes me nervous.
It's like thinking about it for sure.
Ryan Fyfe (48:02.360)
Sure it does.
Yep.
I think the businesses or leaders are going to micromanage their people regardless of whether they use our tool or not.
And I think the flip side to this narrative is the ability for both.
It's because it's not just like monitoring a staff's productivity for the aim of like termination, for example.
It's okay, can I understand what my best performers are doing and how can I replicate them that how can I continue driving the business forward?
And so we see some of our customers that gamify the products that can clearly measure week over week what the performance of the team is.
And then they can actually tie that back to real world results, whether that's increasing customer satisfaction, more sales, more whatever it is.
And so that's, I think, where the positive is and the individual is part of that conversation.
They can see all of their own data, they can help to analyze their time.
They can also help and better understand how they can use their time effectively to do better at their job, which I think is ultimately, I'd like to think what we all want is to be able to do better and add more value.
And so there definitely is the positives that we can come from the tool.
And there's a lot that we're building into the tool to help kind of encourage those types of behaviors.
Omer (49:17.820)
Awesome.
And what kind of businesses are using Work Pulse?
Like we talked about segmentation earlier.
So what have you learned since so far about the kinds of companies where this sort of product resonates more or is providing more value.
Ryan Fyfe (49:36.470)
Yeah.
So one of the first things I did was segmentation.
I was like, oh no, not going to get fooled by this one again.
And so through looking at our revenues and our customer base, same story as humanity, roughly 70% of our customers by volume were like 10% of our revenues.
But we were treating them from a sales and support experience, the same, et cetera.
So we've done a lot already around that just in the last few months.
So we've automated and moved to self service entirely, that bottom end of the funnel with very minor kind of impacts to the actual like bottom line in terms of things like conversion rates and retention.
So that's been super fantastic.
And then where we're focused on is upmarket.
Our product really scales well.
It's got a fantastic user experience.
The infrastructure and the security and things are very sound.
But one of the unique things is that while we're B2B SaaS, we also support a cloud, so our customers can host in the cloud.
And so as you can imagine, we're recording a lot of very sensitive data.
And so whether it's enterprise or just because of specific verticals, we allow our customers to actually host and store all their data on premise.
So that's a unique part.
So really moving up markets and the types of businesses are, I would say, a combination of very large enterprises like we talked about.
They're having to think through remote workforce management, productivity management for the first time.
And so that's been very well for us.
And then there's been some really interesting things that have happened as well.
For example, business process outsourcing, call centers, another strong vertical for us.
And what we're actually seeing is that our tool is being brought into the VPO a number of times by the end clients because they want to see kind of how the resources that they're paying through this intermediary are actually performing and kind of compliance around which tools that they're using.
So there's a compliance element to working remote as well.
You have non government networks, you potentially have personal devices, those devices are going to be more prone to having viruses on them, data leaks, all of those types of things.
So if you're in any sort of a sensitive business or really any business as well, where patient data, client data, customer case data, those types of things can be leaked, There's a lot of focus around that as well.
So ensuring that when people are remote, they're still working, quote unquote safely in terms of the type of data and the tools that they're using.
Omer (52:06.440)
Yeah.
All right, cool.
Well, yeah, I think we should wrap up there and get onto the lightning round.
So I've got seven quick fire questions for you.
Just try to answer them as quickly as you can.
Ready?
Ryan Fyfe (52:21.040)
All right, let's do it.
Omer (52:22.680)
What's the best piece of business advice you've ever received?
Ryan Fyfe (52:25.880)
Follow your guts.
So whether that means evaluating people, I generally know in the first minute whether someone will be a good hire or not.
And so it's just worth kind of making that gut decision and not trying to spend time analyze after and convince yourself otherwise.
Omer (52:40.600)
What book would you recommend to our audience and why?
Ryan Fyfe (52:43.240)
The last book I read was Green Lights, which is a fun read and recommended, but the book I would recommend the most is sitting on my desk actually to reread for probably the 10th time on my upcoming time off.
And it's Atomic Habits by James Clear.
Omer (52:55.800)
Nice.
Ryan Fyfe (52:56.240)
Yep, Just incredible work.
Actionable framework for.
For building good habits and I guess breaking bad ones.
Omer (53:03.000)
What's one attribute or characteristic in your mind of a successful founder?
Ryan Fyfe (53:07.240)
I think never giving up grits.
One of my favorite posters was in my dad's office growing up.
It's of a frog that's being eaten by a pelican and his hands are coming out of the mouth of the pelican and he's choking the bird so that I can't eat him.
And the words are never give up.
I love that.
Omer (53:27.160)
What's your favorite personal productivity tool or habit?
Ryan Fyfe (53:30.560)
Well, coming back, I guess just to Atomic Habits.
So in that book he outlined so many cool methods, I think just making things easy and inevitable to do so, making them visible, making them easy, not trying to overdo things when you're starting and focusing on building the habits that ultimately changes your behavior versus on the end goal itself.
So the habits will help you get there.
Omer (53:50.880)
What's a new or crazy business idea you'd love to pursue if you had the extra time?
Ryan Fyfe (53:55.690)
I'm working on it right now.
It's called Strata 6.
And so with offices in different places and working kind of always from home, over the last decade I've spent a lot of time in hotels and Airbnbs.
And so the idea is really just around my frustration with the lack of consistent service that you get from a distributed network like Airbnb.
So trying to combine kind of a guaranteed level of accommodations and things that are really built for remote work first versus that kind of being an afterthought.
So that's something I'm actively working on in my side time.
Omer (54:29.300)
Why did I have a feeling you were already working on something else as well?
Ryan Fyfe (54:33.220)
Yeah, it's hard to have focus, but it's kind of a part of diversification.
Really a pet project more than something else.
Omer (54:39.900)
But yeah, what's an interesting or fun fact about you that most people don't know?
Ryan Fyfe (54:45.060)
I spent time in New Zealand growing up.
Omer (54:47.410)
Well, you spend time all over the place, right?
Ryan Fyfe (54:50.050)
Everywhere.
Omer (54:51.810)
Yeah.
And finally, what's one of your most important passions outside of your work?
Ryan Fyfe (54:56.690)
Probably exercise.
Trying to stay in shape.
I was a competitive middle distance runner growing up.
Kind of a fun fact there, I guess as well.
And then now I've taken to cycling, so trying to get out as much as I can.
Omer (55:09.170)
Awesome.
All right, so if people want to find out about humanity, then go to humanity.com work pulse is at work pulse, that's p u l s dot com and if folks want to get in touch with you, what's the best way for them to do that?
Ryan Fyfe (55:26.750)
LinkedIn would be the best.
Omer (55:28.590)
All right, we'll include a link to your LinkedIn profile in the show notes and people can say hello from there.
Great.
Well, Ryan, thank you so much for for joining me and sharing your story.
Congratulations on the decade long journey with humanity and exiting that business.
And I wish you all the best of luck with WorkPulse and Strata6.
Ryan Fyfe (55:54.240)
I appreciate that.
Omer, thank you so much for having me on the show and hope this was helpful for anyone listening and feel free to reach out like Omer mentioned.
So thanks again.
Omer (56:03.120)
Awesome.
Thanks a lot.
Cheers.
